Mandy Rose Draws People

July 22, 2025

I have so much to say about perfectionism.

This is perfectionism.

Or better yet,

I know that this one doesn't have people as its subject (I draw animals and buildings too), but it illustrates perfectionism perfectly. I used magnifying glasses, for pity's sake.

Perfectionism is exhausting.

The first picture took 18 hours over three days. The bottom one only slightly less time. The toll on my eyes, back and shoulders from sitting hunched over at my table drawing for that long was incalculable. Plus, despite the immense effort I put into the horse picture, I have never been able to sell a single copy. Not even a print.

Perfectionism. Tell me, what's the point?

I did this for a year.

I think the realization came during my first massive art show. I sat at my booth for a week, eight hours a day. Thousands of people went by. Many complimented me. A few took one of my business cards. Not one bought my artwork. Not. One.

At the end of the week, I packed up my work and went home, a week out of my life gone and I was enriched only in experience. That was three years ago. No one who took my card has ever called me back.

That was when the truth began to niggle at me.

I wasn't getting anywhere with perfectionism. I wasn't selling anything and I was bored to tears with every drawing. Sure, everyone said they loved my work and my gosh, it was beautiful and I was so talented! I heard those words over and over again. But praise isn't money. Pretty things don't buy groceries. And creating perfectly detailed, photorealistic was making me miserable.

So I froze. Solid.

For years.

I went back to work--a REAL job. I stopped drawing entirely. There was obviously no money in making myself miserable creating perfect work and I couldn't allow myself to do anything else, because I didnt know how to do anything else and so making any art would mean the F-word--FAILURE. I'm a Capricorn. I don't FAIL. I don't create BAD. I have spent YEARS learning to create the best work possible, forcing myself to color inside the lines with perfect shading and linework, making sure every detail is in place, because I'm better than everyone else. I HAVE to be.

I know, right? Massive. Eye roll.

It wasn't until I learned to say the F-word, out loud, that my creative self began to thaw. I discovered that failure, rather then reflecting badly on you as a person, is a natural part of life, and in order to eventually succeed in anything you actually need to fail at it first, thousands and thousand of times. Ergo, I could create terrible work, and not only would I be ok, I would thrive.

Suddenly, I gave myself permission to create again.

And I have failed WELL. For the past year, I've been creating terrible work, and, *gasp* even putting it online! I've gone from this

And this

To this

In PUBLIC!!!!

Am I happy about this? Not on your life. Allowing myself to be imperfect and even terrible has been one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. Letting people see my garbage? That's an indescribable pain. Gag me with a spoon, it hurts seeing my crap in the world. None of you are supposed to know how bad I really am at art. But the blindfold has been ripped off. Spectacularly.

July 21, 2025

"...You should strive for a release from the live-action-ness of the model and extract from it, not what it is, but what it is doing..." Walt Stanchfield, Gesture Drawing for Animation, Chapter 6: Pushing the Gesture

I've heard that the first part of dealing with an addiction is admitting to it.

Hi. My name is Mandy Rose. I am addicted to sketchbooks I never use, art supplies I use even less, drawing and writing books, and most of all, figure drawing reference.

Maybe you laugh. I assure you, this is not an exaggeration.

I haunt Art Station, checking faithfully every morning (sometimes several times a day if I'm bored) for new packs that look interesting, things I might want in the future, and the holy grail of all of it, the 70% off sale that occurs several times a year. Over the past decade I've collected so many references that I'm going to need an external hard drive to store them all in the very very near future, sooner if I continue the way I've been going lately.

I don't know why I do this. Maybe I'm the undiagnosed neurodivergent I've been told I am. I think there's something about the human figure that fascinates me endlessly. If I never drew anything but people ever again, I would never be bored. And every time I get a new reference pack, the potential of what I can do with it in the future and what I can draw makes me giddy. It's MINE! All MINE!

The irony is that real people terrify me. So my obsession with them is kind of bizzare.

I love exploring the interaction between people and animals. This is an old portfolio piece from my super-realism days.

Now, only a few years later, I'm doing this.

My obsession isn't shocking, really. My artist "idols" growing up were Vermeer, Norman Rockwell, Arthur Rackham and Alphonse Mucha. I've recently discovered Eugen von Blas and the pre-Raphaelites. People in pictures don't scare me. They don't have strange rules that I'm constantly running through without realizing. I'm not awkward around them. They don't say and do things that confuse me; they don't get mad when I say something that's perfectly normal in my mind but goes against one (or many) of their unspoken rules, those miserable rules that they all seem to know instinctively somehow, but I can't grasp. People in pictures make SENSE.

Even when they look like this.

July 20, 2025

My name is Mandy Rose, and I'm learning to draw.

Ha ha! Funny joke. I've been "learning to draw" for nearly four decades.

I've also been learning to paint, write fiction, heirloom garden, cook things people will actually eat, bake decent cookies and not burn them, raise children without going crazy, do housework without losing my mind (nearly didn't make that one) AND--on top of all that-- drive to work and back without hitting the curb (every day is a challenge). Each morning I wake up again and hope that today is the day I can let go and let God do His thing and maybe learn to do some math on the side (don't ask how that's going). I am a perpetual student of pretty much everything, and still an expert on nothing.

In the last two months, however, I’ve been focused on learning to draw for animation.

From what I understand, at least from what I've been reading from Stanchfield and White, this means learning to shorthand my drawings, to go from focusing on the figure itself to focusing on the emotion and the story the body tells. Paring down my demented obsession with details into armatures and stick figures.

It's taking a lot longer than it should be. Drawing for animation is completely different than classical figure drawing. 

This is a problem, right? My brain has been trained to draw perfect figures. Now I have to unlearn everything I've spent so many years learning.

I'm not saying this is going to be hard, but I'm being told I have to go from this

To this.

And somehow I have to do this in between carting snacks for my elementary-aged boys. What am I, superwoman?

I deliberated for a long time on where to start. In David B. Levy's book "Your Career in Animation,'' he tells of taking his sketchbook full of figures into Disney only to be told that his loose, rough unfinished figures were the only thing of value in his sketchbook, and that if he could do more like those he could have a job at Disney. That summer he went out and filled a bunch of sketchbooks (I think it was seven or so) with those loose scribbled figures. He took his sketchbooks back to Disney in the fall and got the job he'd been trying for in the spring.

That seemed like as good a place to start as any.

Since I work best being motivated by challenges and deadlines, I decided to try a figure drawing challenge. I thought I would go with the hardest thing possible, of course. Because I don't know how to work small. Three Chapters-Indigo sized sketchbooks (720 pages) of figure drawings before the end of Septmeber, 2025. Maybe, I'd get lucky and somehow in three months discover the magical formula to go from fine art figure drawing to drawing for animation.

It's almost the end of July. I've reached page 100. Woo hoo!

The beginning. Page 1. June 6, 2025.

Animation instructor says I'm still too focused on anatomy, and not enough on emotion.

The figures are in boxes because, as I said earlier, I work LARGE. As in, entire page for one figure large. I've been doing things that way since I first started putting pencil to paper. That's a lot of years. So somehow, I now have to train my brain to be able to draw within a smaller frame so I can start working with thumbnails. You can see how well that's going, right?

The Middle. Page 50. Experimenting with a different way of doing things.

1/7th of the way through. Page 100. July 20, 2025. Once again, a different style.