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Animation

Drawing Animation
Birgitta Hosea Animation 2010 5: 353 DOI: 10.1177/1746847710386429 The online version of this article can be found at: http://anm.sagepub.com/content/5/3/353

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Article

Drawing Animation
Birgitta Hosea

Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 5(3) 353367 The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1746847710386429 anm.sagepub.com

University of the Arts London, UK

Abstract Drawing is a key component of traditional practice in classical animation that is sometimes seen as an outmoded form lacking relevance to a digital age. On the contrary, the use of digital tools and virtual materials can still be seen as problematic by some animators schooled in traditional methods. In contemporary art, however, there is an explosion of experimentation with different tools, processes and paradigms, and a resurgence of interest in drawing around issues of time, performance and materiality. This article considers the processes and theorization of drawn animation in light of these different practices and tools. Drawing is reflected on in terms of material basis and conceptualization. It is explored as a process that can represent the passage of time and the performance of a character, yet is in itself a performative activity with duration. Keywords algorithmic drawing, animation process, digital drawing, drawing, drawn animation, material practice, performance drawing, Joanna Quinn

Introduction1
What exactly is drawing? What constitutes a line? Pencil on paper? Ink on acetate cel? A finger leaving its trace in sand? In an era of mice, keyboards and screens, bits and bytes, has the use of digital materials reduced drawing from an expressive demonstration of human subjectivity to one of mechanistic technique? What implications for classical drawn animation does computer technology have? An examination of drawing in the context of animation is a useful starting point for a consideration of a range of issues. This article engages with ideas about drawing in animation that reflect an iterative loop of interests in my work which have resulted both from experimental practice and in experimental practice. As a practitioner, I would like to argue for the contribution of practice-based research to animation studies.2 In my experience (as a maker, as a curator, as an educator and as a viewer), animation is a complex dialogue between a creative intent, various practical materials and processes, the viewers individual act of perception and the historical, social and cultural context of both the production and reception of the work. This article will focus on the second of these areas the material

Corresponding author: Birgitta Hosea, MA Character Animation, Central Saint Martins, 10 Back Hill, Clerkenwell, London, EC1R 5EN Email: b.hosea@csm.arts.ac.uk

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practice of animation. I will consider the doing of drawing drawing as a material process, as a record of time and as a performative act as opposed to an analysis of the drawn.

The materiality of drawing

Scratch, glide, scrape, inscribe: drawing is the product of a material process in which the residue of media is used to make marks on a surface. It involves a tacit knowledge of tools and materials how to hold a pencil or pen, how to move the arm and wrist, how to apply pressure and alter the angle to create a variety of marks. The media used to make marks are conventionally seen as the defining factor in the activity known as drawing. Thus, a common-sense understanding of drawing is of an activity that produces (a picture or diagram) by making lines and marks on paper with a pencil, pen, and so on.3 This assumes that the surface that is drawn upon with a pencil, pen (etc) and that contextualizes and frames these marks, is made of paper. Yet case studies of artist animators such as Frdric Back, Paul Driessen, Richard Reeves, Michael Dudok de Wit, Luis Cook and Gerrit van Dijk illustrate that many different mark-making tools and surfaces are used to create drawn animation: wax based crayons on frosted cels, direct inscription or ink onto film, charcoal, pencil and mixed-media drawing over printed out frames of CGI animation, and so on. (Wells et al., 2008: 148175). To define drawing through the specific media used to create marks is a reductive approach that cannot encompass the range of work that is being created by contemporary animators and artists.

The line
A conceptualization of drawing that foregrounds the visual marks produced, such as a markmaking process used to produce a line-based composition (Jana, 2006: 5), suggests that drawing can be defined by the production of linear marks, rather than through the use of specific media such as pencil or pen. However, the line in itself is a complex entity for consideration. Edges and contours are not marked with outlines in real life. Citing Merleau-Ponty, Vivian Sobchack argues that the line is an existentially impossible spatial relationship between two points (Sobchack, 2008: 2513). The line is neither present in photo-real cinema nor in the world in front of the camera. It is a conceptual meta-object with no presence other than as an idea made graphic. It reduces existential complexity to the bare minimum, is geometric not lived, evoking not being. As such, the line can be seen as specific to drawing and drawn animation: the animated lineis not concerned with photoreal cinema at all. Rather, it foregrounds animations own internal metaphysics and paradoxes, its own ontology (however qualified in terms of cinema), its own sufficient conditions for being the what that it is (Sobchack, 2008: 2523). Sobchack finds pleasure in the expressive freedom of the line in movement in Raimund Krummes line-based, animated advertisements for Hilton Hotels (Sobchack, 2008: 2545); a freedom that is not present in film or photography. She connects this feeling with Eisensteins notion of the plasmatic as an escape from humdrum reality: the line in the Hilton ads can also be seen as inscribing a social allegory: its abstract geometric base the ground for the superstructural figural fantasies of lost possibility and freedom (Sobchack, 2008: 257). The moving lines in the Hilton advertisements transform between geometric simplicity and the depiction of figures in recognizable scenarios formed from simple outlines. During these transitions between abstraction and representation the line constructs not only a figural narrative but also a narrative of figuration (Sobchack, 2008: 257). In this narrative of figuration, the line itself is a performer. Sobchacks

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pleasure is in seeing the iterative play of unrecognizable abstraction becoming comprehensible as representative of the known world. The line is an entity with no inherent indexical link to, or counterpart in, the real, natural, world, but it can be used to represent the real, natural, world. The linear implies a glimpse of human agency, of a subjectivity that can only be shown through drawing or with drawn animation, not through the lens of a camera.

Digital drawing
As a consequence of notions of the direct and unmediated transfer of idea to drawing, the act of hand drawing is often associated with assumptions of immediacy and authenticity. In her introduction to Vitamin D (Jana, 2006), Emma Dexter, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Tate Modern, suggests that:
the act of drawing itself betokens honesty and transparency all the marks and tracks, whether deliberate or not, are there for all to see in perpetuity. Any erasures or attempts to change the line mid-flow are obvious drawing is a form that wears its mistakes on its sleeve. (Jana, 2006: 6)

Work that is created by digital technology is regarded by some commentators as having lost the authenticity implied by the subjective hand-drawn mark. Rosalind Krauss, for example, asserts that traditional drawn techniques have become superseded by the use of digital technologies, [a]nimation, having now become a matter of computer programming and digital imaging, has lost the kind of handcraft that had still survived even in its late forms of industrialization (Krauss, 2000: 12). Demonstrating a sense of loss for the hand-drawn, Krauss argues that the work of artists, such as William Kentridge and Raymond Pettibon, represents a recrudescence of drawing, which is to say, the upsurge of the autographic, the handwrought, in an age of the mechanization and technologizing of the image via either photography or digital imaging (Krauss, 2000: 9). This argument creates a reductive binary opposition between a notion of drawing as a more direct, subjective and unmediated form of expression than the notional manipulated perfection of a computer-generated, technological image. It associates hand drawing with ideas of expressing individual consciousness through art, and digital imagery with mechanized, mass production. However, digital imagery is created through a more complex set of discourses, processes and paradigms than this suggests. An artist who works with digital media, yet seeks to minimize the influence of software on his drawing, is Simon Faithfull. Faithfulls drawn work employs the traditional paradigm of sketching outdoor scenes from life (en plein air), but engages with technology in that he draws with a Palm Pilot and distributes his drawings online or sends them via email from various locations in the world. He started drawing with a Palm Pilot, because he found paper to be too precious, to have an annoying uniqueness (Faithfull, 2009). Rejecting the mechanistically perfect image, the simple technology that he uses renders his line crude and pixelated. Faithfull prefers this directness and simplicity to the interpolation or anti-aliasing that would be added by the software of a more complex drawing technology to modify his marks. Lea Navigation (Faithfull, 2006) is a continuous drawing of a walk along the river Lea that was created over a week. This work straddles the boundary between still drawing and animation. User interaction activates this panoramic drawing and transforms it into an animation. Interactive hotspots on the web page scroll the drawing at variable speeds so that it creates a bi-directional animated pan across the riverbank (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1. Still from Lea Navigation, 2000, Web-based animation. Simon Faithfull 2000.

Paradigms from traditional pencil drawing are also an integral part of the computer animation process. Whatever form the final output of an animation may take, the use of traditional pencil techniques will have been an important part of the pre-production phase as well the training of the animators. Drawing for Animation (2008) demonstrates that drawing is an essential part of the conceptualization, design and planning processes of CGI animation through storyboarding and the design of characters, locations and props (Wells et al., 2008: 935). It proves that drawing in animation is used for more than the traditional illustration of a movement or the visual communication of a design, but is a vital, non-verbal part of the creative development process. Even if the final outcome is a technologically complex CGI animation, it is conceptualized and planned through drawn designs and storyboards, which serve as direct visual notations of the initial concept. Drawing on a computer, however, is a different experience than drawing with a pencil. The immediacy of drawing and the touch and feel of a pencil on paper is hard to reproduce on a computer with a mouse or with a digital pen and WACOM tablet, although on a superficial level the hand may appear to make the same gestures. The tacit knowledge of how to obtain quality of line that varies in tone, thickness and sharpness from a pencil is not replicated with the use of a computed vector line that is unvarying in tone, thickness or sharpness. Even a bitmap simulation of natural media using one of the painterly software packages does not produce the same results as the use of natural media. Part of the problem is the very concept of CGI; as the visual effects artist Gareth Edwards points out, CGI is an unhelpful term implying that the computer autonomously generates imagery without the involvement of human agency or artistic input (Edwards, 2009). Indeed, the software used and the kind of marks that it can make can have a mediating influence on the resulting animation even to the extent of forming a stylistic genre. It is usually evident to the trained viewer whether an animation is made in Flash, Cel Action, After Effects or Maya. New features in software over the years, such as developments in gradients, opacity or texture mapping, influence style in animation as well as fashion in graphics in general. For example, innovations in the simulation of fur led to a rush of furry creatures in CGI feature films. The pioneering digital artist, Frieder Nake, asserts that the use of a computer with software that someone else has programmed implies the creation of work that is superficial and not original. The work is produced through a readymade formula: the appropriation of a found object of someone elses design

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(Nake, 2008). This argument is reminiscent of an ancient idea circulating among some artists that to truly paint, one must grind ones own pigments. The use of all media involves learned techniques and stylistic devices, which allow the form of the work to be identified within (or, indeed, in opposition to) a canon of practice. The philosopher, Stanley Cavell, uses the term automatism to refer to this process, in mastering a tradition one masters a range of automatisms upon which the tradition maintains itself, and in deploying them ones work is assured of a place in that tradition (Cavell, 1979, quoted in Krauss, 2000: 4). In this sense, the use of off-the-shelf, commercial software comes with a set of implicit automatisms. However, many computer artists resist their work being limited by what the software is supposed to do. In frustration with the clean, rational lines of the digital environment, they display nostalgia for analogue materiality: for the haptic feel and control over a pencil; for dirt, smudges and mess; for the handmade. A computer may be used to put the final work together, but animation or graphic images could incorporate scanned textures from analogue media, such as photographs, drawings and paintings, in combination with a range of digital marks made with different software packages. As computer technology increasingly becomes an essential part of the production and dissemination of all media, the notion of a binary opposition between the digital and the handmade becomes meaningless and a new synthetic paradigm the post-digital emerges. This tendency was made evident with the inception of a new Craftwork category in the 2009 Onedotzero festival, which featured post-digital animation with a combination of both analogue and digital techniques:
In an age driven by non-stop digital culture on fast-forward, many creatives have revived a handcrafted approach to producing new works. Across promos, broadcast and independent shorts alike, directors have begun to rewind to the homemade, stitched and stuck together. From ambitious personal experiments breathing life into corrugated card to quirky productions utilising sewing kits and 3d, a more tactile aesthetic emerges, offering surprising collisions of a new post-digital look. (Onedotzero, 2009)

Through a post-digital combination of traditional drawing, and other analogue techniques, with the utilization of a range of different software programmes with different mark-making capabilities, the automatism of the dominant aesthetic of software can be resisted. In addition, artists and animators are experimenting with technological mark-making that does not use commercial off-theshelf software. They are creating their own hardware and writing their own software. Using Open Source software and sharing knowledge over the internet, artists are creating digital drawings through a range of processes computer programming, custom-built hardware, mobile phones, robots or G.P.S. tracking systems, through to generation through sound or motion detection and drawing with light on the side of buildings (Hosea, 2009). Linear marks can be created through computer programming, but if gestures of the hand are not used, is this drawing? The first fully surviving work of computer animation created in Britain is Tony Pritchetts The Flexipede (1967). This two-minute film shares many characteristics of traditional drawn animation: it features a character in movement and this creature is defined by a black, linear outline on a white background. However, it was not drawn in the traditional sense, but was painstakingly programmed on a mainframe computer over a period of six months then output onto 16mm film (Mason, 2006). Contemporary computer artists use a development of these techniques to create algorithmic, moving drawings produced through geometric and evolutionary principles coded in Processing, ActionScript or more complex programming languages. Sometimes still and sometimes moving images, these drawings are generated either through the complete execution of a piece of code or through user interaction in combination with the code.4

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The lineage of digital mark-making created through programmed computer code can be partially traced back to methods employed by artists involved with the minimalist, systems or fluxus movements, in which the form of a drawing would be stipulated through codification. Artists, such as Sol le Witt in the 1960s and 1970s, constructed sets of instructions that would be a system to produce works of art. The concept behind this kind of work was to create art inspired by ideas mathematics or linguistics rather than an art that merely recorded external reality or expressed the internal emotions of the archetypal tortured artist. Sol Le Witt created images that were systematically generated by logic through different permutations of a rule that he had devised. He would conceive of drawings that he wanted to make and then codify them into a series of mechanical rules for others to enact and complete.5 Teams of assistants would create the finished drawings in pencil by following his instructions and then completing the drawings on gallery walls. Although it was Le Witt himself who had conceived of the original idea behind the wall drawings, he didnt always personally visit the finished works. As other people had executed his drawings, they defy the concept of authenticity that would be affirmed by his presence and the signature of his hand-drawn gestures recorded in pencil. In ARC: I draw for you, at the Centre for Drawing, Wimbledon, contemporary artists group Drawn Together drew on the practice of defining an idea for a drawing through a written rule (called by us an ARC) and then executing those rules in a live performance (Fo et al., 2010, see Figure 2). The group transmitted ARC instructions to each other through hand-written or typed notes, telephone, SMS text messages, email and Skype, and finally transcribed them onto index cards. During the performance, the cards were laid face down on the floor. We would pick them up at random and then enact the written instructions to create live drawings on the wall of the gallery through the use of graphite, sound and digital white light. Our use of instructions to create collaborative drawings highlights the notion that an idea for a drawing can be transcribed and communicated to another person who can complete the work.

Figure 2. Instruction for a drawing from ARC:I draw for you, 2010, Drawn Together (Maryclare Fo, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea, Carali McCall). Drawn Together, 2010.

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Frieder Nake, one of the pioneers of digital image making through code, first exhibited his digital art at Galerie Wendelin Niedlich in Stuttgart in November 1965. Inspired by systems artists like Sol Le Witt, and with a background in mathematics and probability theory, Nake further developed this concept of translating an idea for a drawing into a series of instructions (Nake, 2008). Working before the invention of the mouse or commercial software, he created drawings directly from digital materials using computer code. To create his algorithmically defined linear abstractions, he codified a series of instructions for a visual image into computer programming language so that the computer would constitute the image and complete the drawing for him. Another digital pioneer, structuralist film-maker Malcolm Le Grice, who through his membership of the Computer Arts Society was able to make an abstract animated sequence in 1969, described this process of making images through code in 1974. He stated:
The need to produce a program as a means to achieving a work of art imposes one very significant process on the artist, that of some kind of analysis of the component factors of his image (or output), plus an analysis of the kind of principles by which these components are brought together. (Le Grice, 2006: 219)

Digital technologies have led to new production processes and reproductive technologies that have changed the material basis of the medium that we call animation. Pencils and paper may have been used in the process, but contemporary drawn animation is more likely to have been created with digital materials. The virtual materiality of drawing with a computer brings into question traditional definitions of drawing. The action of drawing into a computer with a digital pen and WACOM tablet can simulate the marks that a real pencil makes, but the mutable world of zeros and ones has a very different material basis than the residue of graphite on paper. The use of virtual materials necessitates the broadening of conventional conceptualizations of drawing, and drawn animation, to go beyond the idea of pencil on paper and include a range of mark-making activities such as computer programming.

Drawing performance: drawing as performance

Thus far, the linear form that drawing takes, and the use of materials to create drawings, has been considered. Animation, however, is a specific instance of drawing, which introduces the dimension of time. The tangled links of interdependence between drawing and animation have a long and complex history, which predate the golden age of Disney in the 1930s and 1940s, a period that is often thought of as the ultimate pinnacle of achievement in drawn animation. Indeed, Jerry Beck argues that the earliest surviving drawings cave drawings were an early form of animation, because they were drawn onto textured rocks and seem to move in flickering candle-light (Beck, 2004: 12). Donald Crafton (1993) argues that the earliest pioneers J. Stuart Blackton, Walter Booth, Winsor McCay, Georges Mlis presented animation as part of a magical performance in which drawings or inanimate objects were brought to life. In a secondary phase, for example the Fleischer Brothers Out of the Inkwell series, the body of the animator was still marked as present and in control of the process, but reduced down to a cipher: the presence of a hand (Crafton, 1993: 259). Finally, when animation as a process ceased to be a novelty to audiences, the hand that held the pencil was displaced by the living drawing personified in the form of increasingly complex and independent animated characters, such as Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse. Crafton concludes that the body of the animator became invisible and began to be thought of as performing through the character produced by the act of drawing (Crafton, 1993: 298).

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The notion that the animator performs by proxy through the character she draws is documented in the canonical book on Disney, The Illusion of Life, which quotes the animator Marc Davis giving the following advice to junior animators: drawing is giving a performance; an artist is an actor who is not limited by his body, only by his ability and, perhaps, his experience (quoted in Thomas and Johnston, 1981: 66). The characters at the Disney studios were conceived of and performed through pencil, before being transferred to cel, and then inked and coloured. This performative power of the drawn line is evoked by Sean Cubitt in his statement that Mickey is born of the act of drawing (Cubitt, 2008). Jessica Rabbit ironically acknowledges her drawn origin in the classic line from Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Im not bad. Im just drawn that way. The Disney style of performance through the drawn line was derived from observation in life drawing, and movement analysis classes, and evolved into a series of universal principles that were believed to imbue cartoon characters with life (Thomas and Johnston, 1981: 4769). Although developed in response to observation from real life, these Disney principles have become reduced to 12 orthodox rules for the simulation of life-like behaviour. I have observed animation students worldwide memorize these rules and repeat them in their work, referencing examples of simulated movement from Disney films rather than their own observation of the natural world. Reminiscent of Cavells notion of automatism discussed earlier, this leads to a limiting vocabulary (Wells et al., 2008: 9) and the creation of animation according to traditional rules and technical methodologies that refer to the canon of classical animation rather than to lived experience. Joanna Quinn is an example of an animator whose practice is rooted in observations from life rather than re-iterating classical formulae.6 She advocates the use of the sketchbook as a research method for gathering ideas for characters and scenarios, practising observational skills, noting details of movement or anatomy, and reflecting on the development of a visual language: The emphasis on observation in drawing for animation cannot be over-stressed in the sense that it is important to draw from life and not from an imagination that would have been already colonized by established image forms (Wells et al., 2008: 46). Quinns drawn characters radicalize traditional representations of the gendered body. Through her use of the drawn line, rather than the photographic lens, Quinn is able to distort and metamorphose the body to unreal, extreme proportions. She exaggerates and disrupts the contours of her characters bodies in order to overturn conventional notions of beauty in a fluid manner that is unique to animation and could not be achieved through a camera. For example, in Body Beautiful (1991), the character of Beryl starts bodybuilding and re-sculpts her curvaceous cellulite into hard, pumped-up muscles that threaten the masculinity of her tormentor, Vince, and she finally beats him in a body beautiful contest (Wells et al., 2008: 34) (see Figure 3). Quinn has a remarkable talent for being able to represent characters through two-dimensional pencil drawings that can transform and perform freely in perspectival three-dimensional movement:
I love finding different ways to bend the head back or twist the torso just by using line to feel the form. Suddenly, Ill see something dynamic and decide to strengthen the line a bit. This is why my drawings have so many lines on them, and why I dont like rubbing them out. It shows my exploration of line, my enjoyment of markmaking. (Wells et al., 2008: 40)

As her characters are not mechanistically delineated, there is space for the viewer to interpret time, space and motion through her use of gestural line. An astute observer of body language, she often uses a mirror to act out parts of a movement and is adept at the slight postural exaggerations that create personality and drama.

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Figure 3. Still from Body Beautiful, 1991, Joanna Quinn. Joanna Quinn, 1991.

Figure 4. Still from Elles, 1994, Joanna Quinn. Joanna Quinn, 1994.

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Drawing performance is a contradictory idea: how can an inert image capture that which is in movement through space and time? Drawing is static, yet when still drawings are shown rapidly in succession through the animation process they create the appearance of movement. It is a paradox that a sequence of motionless drawings played back in a particular manner can create the illusion of movement and time passing, as Alan Cholodenko has expressed, [a]rticulating the animate upon the inanimate, animation draws drawing, that is, draws death to life and life to death at the same time, as it simultaneously draws motionlessness into motion and motion into motionlessness (Cholodenko, 2000: 7). As in Zenos paradox, how can a still image capture the passing of time? How can a single drawn pose from one moment in time reveal the totality of a movement? The work of Joanna Quinn engages with this conundrum. Quinn has revealed that when she worked on Elles (1994) (see Figure 4), she did not have a line tester7 with her to check the movements that her drawings would produce, so she had to act out all the movements herself and analyse them through thumbnail sketches (Quinn, 2009). In the freedom of her line you can imagine her dancing around the room. Quinn argues that the eye recognizes the key drawings, on which she may spend an hour, but the in-between drawings are just movement and she draws them very quickly and intuitively. In films such as Britannia (1993) (see Figure 5), the blurred and messy drawings used in the in-between sections, are often almost unrecognizable, yet they are representations of pure movement. Quinn is a doyenne of drawing: her swirling amorphous in-betweens are a model of how to

Figure 5. Stills from Britannia, 1993, key and in-between drawings, Joanna Quinn. Joanna Quinn, 1993.

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draw time the freer her drawing, the more fluid its movement. The lines of Quinn dance and fly. They do not delineate movement; they are movement: a sumptuous celebration of the curvilinear, of the movement of flesh, of the wobble, of the wiggle, a celebration of the follow-through of fat. Ambiguous swirling lines and her use of blurring suggests that the figure may be in several places at once as it is reminiscent of motion blur. This is a photographic phenomenon, which we have learned to associate with fast movement, in which a fast moving subject is caught several times within one long exposure. The multiple copies of the same subject are offset and combine to result in a blurring of the image. Animated drawings can be made to represent movements that take place over the passage of time. A sequence of drawings played back consecutively in the form of an animation has duration, yet single drawings, taken on their own out of sequence, also record the time that was taken in their creation. The making of a drawing is a time-based activity and a complex drawing may take hours to complete. Drawings that involve extremely intricate detail, or a series of multiple repetitions, draw attention to the time that was spent to create them. Just as prisoners in their cells make marks to indicate the passage of each day, so time can be seen as inherently inscribed in the multiple marks of a drawing. If a single drawing records the time taken in its inscription, could it be thought of as a still animation: an intra-frame animation with all the activity of the artist/animator recorded through line onto one frame? There is a complex play of time within an animation: the time of conception, the time of inscription and the time of reception. Whereas Quinns drawings convince the viewer that they describe coherent, continuous movements, other artists deliberately under-animate their work as a polemical strategy to draw attention to the artificiality of the process and to present their practice in opposition to commercial animation. The artist William Kentridge, for example, resists the label of animation for his moving drawings and denies the illusion of smooth continuous movement. Krauss (2000: 4) regards the hiccup of momentary stillness in his work as a resistance to the medium of film. Similarly, the recent exhibition, Shudder (2010), at the Drawing Room gallery in London presented moving drawings that defied the conventions of classical drawn animation. Stopping and starting, cycling through repetitive movements: these works drew attention to the still image that is the basis of animation. In her accompanying essay, Shudder Shutter Shatter, Esther Leslie considered moving images in the context of the shudder; that involuntary, spasmodic reaction triggered through irrational fear of otherness, similar to the twitching of dead muscle tissue being brought to life through electricity, or the animation process itself in which the lifeless and inanimate is set into movement (Leslie, 2010: 34). The act of drawing is increasingly being seen as the record of a performance, as the aftermath of an action, the trace of the presence of an artists body. Donald Crafton has proposed that contemporary fine art animation is in itself a performance, for example animators who use sand or stopframe manipulated objects or who pixilate the movements of live actors have created performances of which the animation is a recorded documentation (Crafton, 2002: 12). An example of this is evident in filmmaker Paul Sharitss film S:TREAM:S:SECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED (196871), which began as a performance piece.8 Over footage of images of a stream, a metaphor for narrative film, Sharits scratched sequential lines into the filmstrip as it was passing through the projector. Thus, to these representational images were added, and subtracted, marks specific to the material of film. Through this process Sharits aimed to subvert any illusion of reality the images might suggest (Liebman, 1981: 13). Sharitss work is an act of drawing. Tony Godfrey argues, [w]hat a drawing is should be defined more by the activity that initiates it rather than by the material it leaves traces on (Godfrey, 1990:

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12). Tracks in the snow left by a snow plough; the trail of an aeroplane; footprints on the beach all these traces of human activity that leave behind a linear residue can be seen as drawings. Stephen Farthing goes so far as to claim that the largest drawing in the world is the North American road marking system (Farthing, 2006: 7). The idea that drawing is a trace of an action has led several contemporary artists to explore the process of drawing through performance.9 The performance drawing group, Drawn Together, create live, site-specific, mark-making through a combination of graphite, animation, expanded cinema and sound (Drawn Together, 2010). Our experimentation with the process of live drawing is created as a performance in front of a live audience, reminiscent of the chalk talks or lightning sketch act performed in the Victorian vaudeville or music halls by artists such as Walter Booth or J. Stuart Blackton. Our performances can be considered as live animations in which a layered moving drawing emerges over time. Drawn in graphite, white light and sound, the work incorporates the media of traditional drawn animation and is recorded in sequential motion blurred photographs and video documentation (Fo et al., 2010, see Figure 6). A performance drawing is created in front of a live audience in real time. It reveals its process of being made to others as it is being drawn. In Tracey, the contemporary drawing journal, Jane Tormey suggests that a performative drawing is something different entirely (Tomey, 2005). It is a drawing that declares [itself] in its own doing, performs itself and happens spontaneously. It is a record of a compulsive, ritualized activity that affirms the identity of the artist. In my recent work, White Lines (Kinetica Art Fair 2010 and Shunt, London 2010), I examine the notion that performance is drawn and yet drawing is both performed and performative.10 In this live performance,

Figure 6. Documentation of ARC:I draw for you, 2010, live performance drawing, Drawn Together (Maryclare Fo, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea, Carali McCall). Drawn Together, 2010.

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I draw white lines upon myself within a larger than life holographic projection of the same performance drawing. Initially painted black, I disappear into the darkness on stage. The Musion holographic projection system creates such a convincing illusion that the audience cannot tell what is live and what is projection. The white lines on my physical self and those in the holographic video, which is hand-painted to reduce all tonality to black and white, make me progressively appear. It is as if I am drawing myself into existence. The hand of the animator creates the animator herself. I am animator and animated; subject and object; drawing myself through the act of drawing and animating myself through the act of animation. Considering the process of drawing in animation raises issues of the representation of time and movement and how this is conceived of and inscribed. Character animators perform by proxy through their work to represent fictional beings in space and time, but drawing itself is an activity that takes place in space over time. In the act of drawing, the gestures and actions of the artist are recorded by the residue of media that is left behind. Animation of all kinds can be seen as a record of a performance, which the animator has created, and as a performative act.

Conclusion
Digital technology has changed the material basis of animation, and yet the activity of drawing remains at the very core of the animation process, whether the outcome is in a classically drawn or digital form. It is essentialist to conceptualize traditional drawing and hand-drawn animation as honest, personal and subjective in opposition to the bland, mechanized perfection of digital imagery in which individual work is homogenized through the use of standard computer software. Drawing is used in the design and conceptualization of digital animation and in the training of animators: traditional drawn animation is scanned, cleaned-up, colour corrected and edited on computer. Post digital animators work seamlessly with a combination of analogue techniques and a range of digital processes to create imperfect, messy and subjective images with a computer. In a digital environment of zeros and ones, marks do not have to be created through the simulation of pencil on paper. Programming images directly through code leads to a more direct connection with digital materiality. Indeed, the heritage of computer programmed images lies in experiments in drawing by avant-garde artists, in which ideas for drawings were codified for others to enact. Drawing is a material process, but it is reductive to think of drawing purely in terms of the materials that are used. Drawing is far more than the inscription of pen on paper. Drawings can be made with pencil, charcoal, tampons, gunpowder, GPS systems, sound, computer code, light and many other materials. Drawing is, above all, a process in which linear marks are created on a background. These are a construct of human consciousness, an abstraction that cannot be observed in nature. The relationship between animation and drawing raises fascinating issues related to the drawing of movement, performance and time as well as the time-based and performative nature of drawing itself. It is a contradiction to capture something that is moving in a still image; something that is time based in a static form. In animated sequences, drawings represent movement, but the individual still images also record the trace of hand movements and gestures made by the animator. A series of animated drawings represent the passage of time, yet the individual stills also contain an inscription of the time taken to make them. Since the early days of Disney, animators have considered themselves as performing by proxy through their drawing. Drawing uses tools that extend the artists body and materials that mark a residue of the trace of an action. An animation can represent performance, but it can also be seen

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as a record of a performance and a still drawing can itself be performed in the process of being made. Drawing is a record of time or endurance, a transaction, a trace of presence or touch, a ritual, a performance, a map, a form of meditation, of understanding, of thought made tangible. Notes
1 This article was inspired by: Wells et al. (2008) Basics Animation: Drawing for Animation. Lausanne: AVA Publishing. It started out as a review essay of that book and is provoked by its call to widen the philosophy of drawing for animation (p.9). 2 I am mindful here of Paul Wards differentiation between reflexive practitioners, who focus on technique and technology, and critical practitioners, who interrogate and contextualize their practice, (Ward, 2006: 234). 3 Cf. The quote that illustrates the front cover of Wells et al. (2008) 4 Cf. the work of Jared Tarbell and his co-workers at levitated.net (2010) http://levitated.net/daily/index. html (URL consulted June 2009) or Joshua Davis (2010) www.joshuadavis.com (URL consulted June 2009). 5 Cf. Wall drawing No. 146 All two -part combinations of blue arcs from corners and sides, and blue straight, not straight and broken lines, September 1972. Blue crayon, site-specific dimensions. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 6 Cf. also the work of animator and Laban Movement analyst, Leslie Bishko, who has pioneered the application of Labans movement theories to animation (Bishko, 2007: 24). She argues that all too often the 12 rules of Disney are applied mechanistically and do not produce expressive characterization. 7 Equipment that enables the scanning of images in order to preview how they will work in an animated sequence. 8 I am thankful to the peer reviewer for pointing me in the direction of this work. 9 The artist Cai Guo-Quiang brings drawing and performance together spectacularly; his work is a literal trace of an activity. He puts trails of gunpowder onto 13-foot sheets of rice paper and sets them off. The resulting images show scorched, linear marks left behind on the paper (Jana, 2006: 4851). 10 Another example of performative animation can be seen in Gerrit van Dijks I Move So I Am (1998) (Wells et al., 2008: 1725): a clever play on the notion that performance is drawn and yet drawing is performed, in which van Dijk draws himself in the act of drawing animation of himself and, thus, animates himself in the act of animation.

References
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Faithfull, Simon (2009) Artists Panel: Drawn Making Marks Move, panel discussion, part of Animation Breakdown Study Day, Tate Modern London, March 2009. Farthing, Stephen (2006) Drawing: the Future, Symposium Catalogue, National Gallery. London: University of the Arts London. Fo, Maryclare, Grisewood, Jane, Hosea, Birgitta and McCall, Carali (2010) ARC: I draw for you, Studio International, URL (consulted February 2010): http://www.studio-international.co.uk/drawing/ARC10.asp. Fo, Maryclare; Grisewood, Jane; Hosea, Birgitta and McCall, Carali (2009) Drawn Together: Collaborative Performance, Tracey, Contemporary Drawing Research electronic journal, Fragmentation issue, URL (consulted September 2009): http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ac/tracey/frag/drawnto.html. Godfrey, Tony (1990) Drawing Today. Oxford & New York: Phaidon Press Ltd. Hosea, Birgitta (2009) Digital Drawing, paper presented to the Computer Space conference, Sofia, Bulgaria, October/November 2009. Jana, Reena (ed.) (2006) Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing. London and New York: Phaidon Press Ltd. Krauss, Rosalind (2000) The Rock: William Kentridges Drawings for Projection, October, Cambridge, MA, Spring 2000, no92, pp335, ejournal HTML version consulted via Wilson Web, March 2010. Leslie, Esther (2010) Shudder-Shutter-Shatter, essay in Shudder exhibition leaflet, the Drawing Room, January to March 2010. Le Grice, Malcolm (2006) Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age. London: BFI Publishing. Liebman, Stuart (1981) Paul Sharits (Filmmakers filming monographs). St Paul, MN: Film in the Cities. Mason, Catherine (2006) Bits in Motion: Early British Computer-Generated Art Film, Programme Notes, March 2006. London: NFT/BFI . Nake, Frieder (2008) Behind the Canvas, an Algorithmic Space. Reflections on Digital Art, paper presented at SeeingVision and Perception in a Digital Culture, CHArt (Computers and the History of Art) 24th Annual Conference, University of London, November 2008. Onedotzero (2009) Craftwork, Programme Notes, September 2009. London: BFI. Quinn, Joanna (2009) Its Who You Know: Trevor Murphy introduces Joanna Quinn and Erica Russell, artists in conversation for Jotta.com at Central Saint Martins Innovation Centre, June 2009. Sobchack, Vivian (2008) The Line and the Ani-morph, or Travel is more than just A to B, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3(3): 251265. Tormey, Jane (2005) Editorial, Tracey, Contemporary Drawing Research, Performance issue, URL (consulted June 2009): http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ac/tracey/perf1.html. Thomas, Frank and Johnston, Ollie (1981) The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. New York: Hyperion. Ward, Paul (2006) Some Thoughts on Practice-Theory Relationships in Animation Studies, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1(2): 229245. Wells, Paul, Mills, Les and Quinn, Joanna (2008) Basics Animation: Drawing for Animation. Lausanne: AVA Publishing.

Biography
Birgitta Hosea is Course Director of MA Character Animation, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, where she is currently engaged on a practice-based PhD in animation as performance. Her expanded animation practice ranges from video installation and performance art through to commercial motion graphics. In 2009, she was awarded a MAMA Award for Holographic Arts. She is the author of the Easy Guide to Flash series (Focal Press, 2004/2006) and has published articles on performance drawing, digital materiality, animation and performativity.

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