Drawing is Back.

Actually, it never really went anywhere. We know because at Animation Portfolio Workshop drawing is all we do. Artists and animators have never stopped learning and using the immense heft and power of visual language that is revealed in drawing.  Ask any animator.  Drawing has been the chosen method for developing ideas, building worlds, telling stories, designing and animating characters and creating/investigating visual styles for a long, long long time.

In recent times drawing has takena back-seat to computers. The wide-spread popularity of the 3D look in movies has meant that animation feature-film audiences have been served a steady diet of a certain identifiable, standard, predictable “computer” look and feel over and over again. Is the visual style of animated feature films undergoing a massive shift back in the direction of hand drawing?  Creative art direction by Dean Gordon and (APW grad) Patrick O’Keefe has tapped into traditional comic art, urban grafiti and digital matte painting for inspiration. The emergence and popularity of the Oscar winning film Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse seems to signal an updated move toward a very old artform – drawing. The breadth of this shift remains to be seen. One thing is for sure, drawing remains the way to enter the world of animation and the basic visual language to master for a young artist wanting to begin their own journey into animation school and beyond. If you are interested in animation you have to go through that door.  Where animation is concerned, drawing is back. Get ready.