Cinematic Drawing in a Digital Age

There has always been an ambivalent relationship between lens based imagery and the drawn, in particular because of the relationship between drawing and the camera obscura. 

We tend to forget that most of the early camera obscuras were room sized, thus making the experience of watching the images seen very similar to that of watching a film. Except of course that the world was upside down, as of course it is for all of us all of the time, our brains simply inverting the image that falls on the back of our own eyes. 

Animated film is also historically closely linked to processes of drawing, most of us will have made a small flicker book at one time or another by making tiny drawings on the corners of an old novel's pages, thumbing them through to create a short animation. William Kentridge revisits these first principles of animation to produce an extensive and powerful body of drawing led work. He features strongly in the Tate cinematic drawing article but he is also a very good explainer of his own processes. In this video he talks about animation as transformation, and he explains his working processes. He is very good at positioning his practice and in this video he explains the relationships that he feels link drawing with theatre and film and how a cross fertilisation between different mediums can be a wonderful way of enriching and opening out possibilities for practice.

A very different artist that uses animated drawings to develop ideas is Jack Fried. He uses stop motion techniques with collage. He makes initial drawings in such a way that they can be easily cut up or sections painted out and replaced. 

Look at this animated drawing "Brain Lapse" to get an idea of how the technique works. 

He uses ink, gouache, white-out and coffee to get the particular effects he wants. (It's interesting how many artists find some sort of domestic products to supplement their art materials, some using bleach to draw with, others tea to stain or clothes dyes to get particular  colours). 

Jack Fried

Jake Fried began his artistic career as a painter, but as he went through the process of layering and modifying images, he realized what truly interested him was the way the images metamorphosed in the course of making a painting and he changed track to become an animator and in the process began to focus on drawing rather than painterly effects. He modifies and shoots the images over and over again to create these fast changing animations that are all about how images can evolve. 

See: Down to nothing and his website  .

Tacita Dean "The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days' 

However some artists think of their drawings as frames from films that might never be made. This is how Tacita Dean conceived her large chalk drawings "The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days'. (See the Cinematic Drawing in a Digital Age article), conversely Robert Longo has long been interested in making large charcoal drawings of the opening credits of existing movies. 

Robert Longo, Study of Bruce, 2013

The relationship between film and drawing is fascinating. Storyboard artists visualise the film often before any shooting is done, not only in the old days did it save film, but drawing was the only way for set designers to be told what to build and for camera operators to get an idea of how to prepare for any particular shot. So it could be argued that a film is actually a chemical and now digital realisation of a series of drawings. However film is also an immersive experience and its scale has influenced a whole generation of artists, not least the Abstract Expressionists, who made their large scale canvasses in response to the way cinema's huge scale could draw its audiences in. 

David Lynch was an artist who went into film making, look at his early attempts, they are really someone trying to animate a painting. This article on Lynch opens the issues out. See his early short films here.

It's hard to unravel the relationships between painting, drawing and film because they are so intertwined, and what is happening in so many current practices is that artists simply accept that there is a connection between the two and don't worry about it. 

Finally, I don't think it was an accident that Karolina Glusiec won the Jerwood drawing prize in 2012 with her animated film Velocity. I would suggest that more and more people are tuned to animation because of their expose to so much of it during childhood. It's language is clear and deeply learnt because of all those hours sat in front of the TV. If artists can appropriate that, they have a very powerful tool. 

From Velocity: Karolina Glusiec

See also

Post on drawing devices

Drawing, the theatre, perspective, light and film

Art and opera

Also have a look at this pop video, which uses a great range of low tech animation techniques. 

Another music video showing how to be inventive with old animation techniques. 

There is a very good article on William Kentridge's latest show: here. 

Look at Michal Rovner's work, where she uses a variety of surfaces to project on here.

Even mainstream cartoons can be sometimes made using low tech. See