In all my young art classes and early years of college I have been told to draw big. Move your whole arm! Cover the entire eighteen by twentyfour page in charcoal!
Now, in my character design class, taught by Anton Campbell, all he wants us to do is push the pose and find a rhythmic gesture. No requirements for a particularly large sketch book, no charcoal- in fact- he confiscated my pencil and gave me a bic black ink pen. So here is how he works,
Our model strikes a pose and the class is given thirty second to gesture the entire figure. Wait no, I take that back. students in Anton's class are not permitted to begin drawing until we have put our sketchbooks down, rose from our chairs and mimicked the pose of our model. We need to understand where the weight is being placed and how the body is twisting before pencil touches paper. Okay, now the gesture. Thirty seconds, the entire figure, go. No cut off heads, no missing limbs, one complete gesture with balance and silhouette. If the pelvis is moving down and forwards, the ribs and shoulders are bending up and back and vise versa. Then, we have a minute to adjust the proportions, get those legs the same length, make sure her neck isn't too long. No clean up lines though! A sketch should be beautiful as a sketch. If I have to ass a clean line and shading to make it look good, something is wrong. Depending on how long the pose is, never more than five minutes, we are able to dedicate the rest of our time to detail.
Recently, because it's character design and our figures need to tell a story, he's had us write a word bubble or emotion before drawing, and frankly, I've never had more fun in an illustration class. Our first day he told us a story about emptying our teacups- to stop clinging to our self taught illustration habits and open our minds to learning new things. His techniques were/are intimidating- I've always drawn figures from the head, to start from the feet threw everything I knew about proportions into a tailspin. In the midst of all this new information I asked my professor, half joking "Will I be okay?". He said, "Absolutely. You're on the battlefield right now, but I'm not leaving without all of you on the helicopter."
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