Learning to draw like a child

Pablo Picasso is regularly quoted as having said,

 "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

 

 

What Picasso is really saying here is that ignoring extraneous details and simplifying everything down to it's basic components/shape/features is something that children do on a daily basis, but as adults we need to train our brains into a more abstract and creative way of thinking to return to that skill. Picasso is not actually talking about painterly skill at all, but an artistic thought process.

 

In these sketches you can see how he has simplified his drawings over and over again to achieve the simple, clean design at the end. Quentin Blake also has a similar approach and uses a lightbox to re-draw his illustrations several times until the sketch is much cleaner and less fussy and detailed than the original. This is a technique I will need to adopt if I want to capture the essence of childhood in my animation for Claire House. In the past I have enjoyed simplifying photos and film to single line styles (bunny examples below), and it works really well for rotoscoping film footage as well because it allows the movement to be the focus.