I spent most of today encouraging a colleague to loosen up, pick up a pencil and push aside the CAD software for a while. After lunch I finally succeeded. The next challange was to get her to loosen up her drawing technique and enagage with the action of drawing before worrying about the final result. It’s not a means to an end, it’s a process. You’ve heard me say that before.

I didn’t have much success, but then it’s only day 1. Perhaps I’d have done better if I’d seen the recent post over at 37signals.com: “Forget the detail” and other animation inspired lessons

Quoting from notes posted at animationmeat.com:

The artist, when he first gets an inspiration or tackles a pose in an action analysis class, sees the pose, is struck by its clarity, its expressiveness, then after working on it for a while that first impression is gone and with it goes any chance of capturing it on paper. That’s the reason. we should learn to get that first impression down right away – while it’s fresh, while it’s still in that first impression stage – before it starts to fade…

Much to be learnt – go read. A great compliment to the second section entitled Abstracting the essence would be Rod’s recent sketches at a Brian Eno lecture.

Let’s hope I have more success tomorrow.