Lead to the Emotion

A well constructed drawing should have all the parts and they should be put together
beautifully, but that is not what you should see when you look at the drawing. What you
should see is the emotion. In a drawing of a starving man you should see fear and hunger
and despair, and you should feel this, plus pity and revulsion and anger. All gestures
won’t be quite that dramatic, but all gestures are certainly more than their parts.

Give Them the Experience

Drawing for animation is not just copying a model onto paper; you could do that better
with a camera. Drawing for animation is translating an action into drawing form so an
audience can retranslate those drawings back into an experience of that action. You don’t
just want to show the audience an action for them to look at it. You want to visualize an
action for them to see – that is, to experience. That way you have them in your grasp,
your power, and then the story can go on and the audience goes on with it, because they
are involved. You have allowed them to experience it.

The parts of the figure must be put together in a manner that will portray or caricature the
meaning of the pose. Otherwise it will be just a drawing. What a horrible fate – to be just
a drawing.