How to Draw (Movement)
Showing movement in comics, William Anastasi, A.J. Dungo's In Waves, hex #fbf7e0, and more.
Howdy, friend.
Later this month I’ll be traveling to Singapore; I’m leading a two-week education abroad trip with students from my university, a program I’ve been developing for nearly three years. There, we’ll discuss the history of Singapore, its arts, cuisine, and culture, and find ourselves in all sorts of wonderful immersions. One of my art goals in 2023 has been to practice drawing buildings and cityscapes more frequently, very much a weakness of mine. Singapore, with its remarkable collection of architectural wonders, will offer an abundance of exciting inspiration—I can’t wait.
This trip, and all that we’ll be doing during it, also has me thinking about movement, the topic of this month’s newsletter. After last month’s newsletter all about crafting stillness and quiet, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how quickly I blew through movement and how important it is to this medium. So, this addendum will discuss how essential movement is, how we perceive and manifest it in two-dimensional work, and walk through some exceptional examples to inspire our own work. We can’t have movement without stillness, and vice versa, so here we are.
If this is your first time visiting, a hearty welcome. Previously, we’ve discussed how and why we draw Ourselves, the mechanics of crafting Mood, and what Stillness and Quiet mean in comics. I have subscribe buttons sprinkled throughout this post—please consider signing up so you don’t miss anything. My goal with this newsletter is to create conversation. Not an artist or comics-maker? Totally fine. Maybe there’ll be something here you can pull into your writing, or at the very least, I hope you’ll revisit comics as an artful, layered storytelling medium with new knowledge of what makes them so great.
Stay safe out there. ♡
– RJR
“When there’s motion, let that motion, rather than predetermination, be the energy for the drawing—rather than consulting the aesthetic prejudice of the moment, which we usually do when we draw if our eyes are open.”
―William Anastasi
To show movement in a fundamentally static medium is, at its core, a challenge. To look at movement necessitates us asking what “movement” even is.
Movement is a change or a development—or, simply, “an act of changing physical location or position or of having this changed.” How we view movement is inherently anthropocentric, I think, and this dictionary definition certainly colors it this way: Movement is something we humans do, or is something done in our presence; some act of physicality, of change. Meaning: We must be present for movement to happen. Without us as witnesses, the world is still.
This is hardly true, of course—we can logic out that the wind, somewhere, is blowing through the boughs of a tree, unseen by anyone—and in this conversation we’ll discover how important the extradiegetic is (that which happens between the panels; what is unseen on the page) and how it shapes our understanding of movement.
I think often of William Anastasi’s “Pocket Drawings,” a series of small, abstract drawings he created by carrying a graphite pencil and a small piece of paper in his pocket as he went about his daily activities. Throughout the day, he made marks on the paper by responding to the movements of his body and the environment around him. These marks were not preconceived or planned, but rather a spontaneous reflection of his bodily sensations and the rhythms of his surroundings.
Anastasi's "Pocket Drawings" are intimately connected to movement and the importance of how we move. They capture the subtle nuances of bodily experience and highlight the ways movement can serve as a source of inspiration. Anastasi's process emphasizes the importance of being present in the moment and attuned to one's surroundings, a state of mind that is often associated with mindfulness and embodied awareness.
So: Movement is a physical change and also an awareness of our surroundings.
In comics—superhero, diary, literary, manga, any and all—we strive to show a world of our creation. Whether this world is fantastical or some version of reality as we know it, we are not fixed beings. We do move—and must. Even a stroll to the corner store, quiet as it may be, tells so much about us and our surroundings, where we live, how we keep to ourselves (or don’t), and how we interact with the world. Stillness as a literary technique is powerful and can help themes and motifs settle in, allowing the reader to embed themselves more intimately into the narrative; movement is less a literary technique, as I see it, and more a necessity of storytelling. Unless there is a reason your characters are sitting in one place, never moving, the same drawings, again and again, populating each panel, there will have to be movement of some kind. It is human to move, to be antsy, to prowl room to room or to stroll or lumber, to just pace in place.
We can break movement down into three key areas to help us understand the role it plays in our narrative work:
Communication - Facial expressions, body language, and gestures can convey emotions, intentions, and social signals. In addition, dance and other forms of expressive movement can communicate cultural values, traditions, and beliefs.
Self-awareness - Through movement, we can explore and express our emotions, desires, and experiences, and gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.
Embodiment - Our movements are not just physical actions, but are shaped by our emotions, thoughts, and perceptions, and are intertwined with our subjective experiences.
It can be challenging to show movement in a two-dimensional medium like comics because the medium itself is immobile and lacks the natural motion of real life. To overcome the limitations of this form, we must use various techniques to suggest movement and action within each panel and across multiple panels. Think: lines, shapes, color, and composition.
What you’ll notice as we begin to dissect some examples is that we rarely draw the minutiae of movements: We won’t draw every bodily shift or footfall of a character tripping down some stairs. In fact, we may be able to show this act of movement simply in three panels, like so:
See, our brains fill in the gaps here, automatically piecing together the missing information to create a coherent narrative. Our brains have learned to recognize patterns and anticipate the most likely sequence of events—a cognitive process called perceptual closure. By combining familiar cues with our imagination, our brain constructs a mental representation of the missing action between panels. In this case, we can imagine that the person lost their balance while descending the stairs, leading to their fall in the third panel. We don’t need to see anything more to get what’s happening.
Our brains have a remarkable ability to make predictions and fill in gaps using prior knowledge and experience; this is an important tool we use in comics to help push our narratives forward, to show action and movement.
Here’s another example from Tarzan #229 (March 1974), written and illustrated by Joe Kubert.
Here, Tarzan, off-panel, jokingly tosses fruit at his ape family. This represents a key way we can show movement in comics: incremental changes, often used with panels of the same size, to show a particular (often subtle) sequence of movements. Here, by showing slight variations in the repeated panels, Kubert depicts the gradual progression of the apes’ response. There is very little data in these panels, and yet they speak volumes to the action: We can practically hear the jungle sounds, the apes screeching in annoyance, birds calling far off.
Additionally, repeated panels can capture key gestures or poses that represent different stages of movement. By focusing on significant moments, the artist can convey the action effectively—and by keeping the background the same, we are hyper-fixated on the movement of the apes.
Another challenge in capturing movement is the need to balance the need for clarity and the desire to create a dynamic visual experience. Comic artists must ensure that their depictions of movement are clear and easy to understand, while also creating a sense of excitement and engagement for the reader. This can be particularly difficult when dealing with complex actions or fast-paced scenes; however, it’s one of the draws of manga comics.
Manga comics tend to have an overall slower pacing than Western-style comics (for example, as of March 2023, the manga One Piece is made up of 105 volumes), which gives them ample time to draw out very nuanced action sequences and create a genuinely mesmeric reading experience. Manga artists often emphasize movement and motion in their illustrations, using dynamic angles, exaggerated poses, and speed lines to convey a sense of energy and excitement.
Let’s look at a two-page spread from the acclaimed Lone Wolf and Cub, created by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima.
Here we see drawn-out movement with lots of action lines; because of this, we process the information here as if we’re watching a television show or film. It’s rapid-fire, both dynamic and easy to follow. The panels here are all different sizes, asking us to put different values on the actions, Ogami Ittō’s massive sword swings versus the diminutive THUD of a severed foot falling into nearby shrubbery. We are not meant to intone every panel with the same weight, the artist controlling the narrative and how they want us to read the action.
Now let’s look at a spread from Black Widow, written by Kelly Thompson and illustrated by Elena Casagrande.
Now, this is something completely different. There are no panels in here, asking us to track the beginning and end of a series of movements on our own—Black Widow fighting off a group of thugs—therefore inviting us back to look deeper and, maybe, find something new at each pass. In the Lone Wolf spread, the action and the narrative are very straightforward—there’s no real need to revisit these pages. Here, though, without panels penning us in, our eyes are asked to feast on the whole thing at once, to make sense of it in our own way and in our own time.
Now let’s look at something a bit quieter, a series of panels from “Go Owls” by Adrian Tomine, a story about an addict and a dealer and their co-dependent, toxic relationship, found in his story collection Killing and Dying.
Again, we have panels of the same size that help us perceive time evenly. There are some small action lines—the sugar being shaken into the coffee, scratches of a chin—we have slight changes of posture and framing, and even though this is a rather quiet, static scene, we still get a sense life is happening. Here, perceptual closure again: We fill in the gaps, can picture the full scene in our minds, the din of the restaurant, the clang of silverware, the squelch of the vinyl booth.
In Waves, a graphic novel by A.J. Dungo about grief and surfing, necessitates, given the subject matter, showing movement and does so in such a poignant, beautiful way.
Dungo uses wide panels to capture the vastness of the ocean or the expanse of a wave, while smaller, tightly framed panels convey the intensity and agility of the surfers. The size, shape, and arrangement of the panels create a visual rhythm that mimics the flow and energy of the water, too.
Last, let’s look at something completely different, an excerpt from Tillie Walden’s The End of Summer which shows how children pass their time over the course of a day.
The narrative tells us these panels are connected, even though the action in each is disjointed. Again, we fill in the blanks, piecing together connective tissue, that running and chasing and exploring and boredom will lead, at some point, to exhaustion. (We can certainly feel the exhaustion in the last panel here, following the characters and their adventures.)
Each of the examples above shows movement in such a particular way that works for their respective narratives. As comic artists, it's crucial that we ensure our depictions of movement are clear, easy to understand, and create a sense of excitement and engagement for readers, regardless of the scale. As readers, we want to be caught up in the story's motion, carried by the panels' rhythms and the artwork's energy. Movement enables us to experience action, emotion, and the characters' humanity, even if they are not humans themselves.
Create a four-to-six-panel series depicting your character(s) engaged in various movements, the bulk of which occur off-page. The goal is to convey movement in each panel while using perceptual closure—the unseen—to bridge the narrative gaps. The characters should start somewhere and end somewhere, with clear action and a focus on conveying the sense of the movement you do include.
Remember: Feel free to depict the movement in a broad or detailed manner. In The End of Summer we see snapshots of interconnected games and chase sequences that are still closely related, even if each panel presents a larger jump between these actions. In other examples we've discussed, such as Tarzan, using panels of the same size and a consistent background can help us showcase subtle movements and motion. Be as dynamic as you like, ensuring that readers can connect the dots, but have fun with it: I’m less interested in finished products here; I want to see you capture motion in an otherwise static medium.
There is no wrong way to do this, friend. This is not about experience or how “good” you are. Comics and drawing and art is all subjective. Even with little practice or training, you can still create a fully realized and emotionally resonant piece. Not to oversimplify the process, but this really is just about adding lines and shapes on the page in a way that pleases you. That’s all this needs to be. Don’t hold yourself back dwelling on what you think you “can’t do.” This is you taking control of your own story. Delight in that.
Play and see what sticks. It’s very rarely the first version of something that hits the mark. If you like one aspect, scrap everything else and cling to the bits you’re excited about. Show it to no one or everyone. (Want to share with me? Please do! Tag me—I’m @Robhollywood on Twitter and Instagram—or email me: robertjamesrussell@gmail.com.)
What I’m reading:
Graphic: In Waves by A.J. Dungo
Poetry: Sugar Work by Katie Marya
Memoir: Barbarian Days by William Finnegan
Graphic: Scenes from an Impending Marriage by Adrian Tomine
Graphic: The World of Edena by Mœbius
Graphic: Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely
A perfect panel:
The World of Edena by Mœbius
The color I’m obsessed with right now:
hex #fbf7e0 – “Citrine White”
Beautiful things I’ve watched (and/or rewatched) recently and can’t stop thinking about:
Lucky Hank (2023)
Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)
The Thing (1982)
Barry (2023)
Heat (1995)
Tampopo (1986)
News:
My 2023 comics workshop with Word West has been officially announced! I’ll be leading a 6-week, Zoom-based workshop introducing diary comics. This is for anyone at any artistic level who has an interest in creating work inspired by their lives. We’ll dig into examples and why they work, discuss the basics of comics-making, and share our own work with each other. I taught this workshop in 2022 and it was such a holistic experience: students got comfortable with each other very quickly, we asked questions and talked about our inspirations and it was glorious to see how everyone was interpreting homework assignments and creating. There are a limited number of spots open for this workshop, and last year they filled up faster than expected, so if you’re interested…check it out ASAP. If you have questions, feel free to hit me up. ♡
A way out, I know, but I’m excited to be teaching a FREE ONLINE workshop with the Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) on Friday, September 8 at 7:00 PM EST. We will discuss drawing oneself as a non-human avatar, explore the reasons behind it, examine some examples together, and allow ample time for drawing. This workshop is open to ANYONE, regardless of their level of experience. Mark your calendars, and stay tuned for more information as the date approaches. ✌️