BEFORE DRAWING BECAME mere "mark making," the skill of hand-done illustration had a tremendous impact on modern painting. The painters that fueled modernist art in France in the early 1900s often had illustration backgrounds—Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pablo Picasso come to mind. Then, as now, artists often made their living with "commercial art," that is, drawing illustrations for magazines and newspapers.
That put the Parisian artists, and others in America, within the “Golden Age of Illustration,” which ended by 1940. Little remembered now, New York City in the 1930s had some of the best draftsman of any century—a second era in great illustration. They turned out magazine and paperback book covers on a factory-line schedule. With pulp fiction especially, the men were separated from the boys: Almost daily, illustrators had to produce realistic and dramatic work. They were a cadre of superb experts in drawing—forgotten names now, as Abstract Expressionism made stars and headlines.
Although photography had ended the peak of commercial illustration, the third era of illustration stayed alive with early animation, emerging especially out of Los Angeles. As late as 1970, sophisticated animation required skilled draftsmen to draw hundreds, even thousands, of "story boards." These would be photographed one by one, frame by frame, then run together on film to animate motion. Again, as in the past, commercial artists were some of the best draftsmen on the planet.
That third era finally gave way, undermined by the new technology of computer graphics. The best example of this cave-in was the rise of Pixar in the mid-1980s, the first computer-generated graphics company.
Pixar, named after the computer screen pixel—that tiny electronically-generated square of color that makes up computer imagery on a film or a monitor screen—opened as a small studio on the east side of San Francisco Bay.
At the start, Pixar struggled to sell a small animation computer product. To promote its capabilities in 1986, a staffer produced a short animation for the Dallas computer-graphics conference, SIGGRAPH. Titled “Luxo, Jr.,” the computer-made film told the story of parent and child desk lamps (Luxo brand) playing with a ball on the table.
With the breakthrough noticed, Pixar next had to prove itself viable by doing TV commercials. Pixar had bypassed the need for hand-drawn “scenes,” not able to replicate and revise each by computer instructions. One artist could produce in a short time what a studio of illustrators used to turn out over weeks.
The days of hand-drawn animation are still in memory. When the Disney studio revived feature length animation in 1989 with “The Little Mermaid,” it was all hand inked and painted. It was shot frame by frame. “Little Mermaid” was the most expensive art-man-hours project Disney had funded.
Now, computer animation is the genie out of the bottle. Anyone with a powerful computer can try it out. To “draw,” in fact, you can begin with a photograph, then morph it into what looks like a drawing.
In the past generation, some fine art painters have employed animation. One thinks of the South African artist William Kentridge, who did large charcoal drawings, as if story boards, and linked them together as an animated film. With an iPhone today, painters can "paint" picture that look reasonably like dabs of painting—the apps provide different kinds of brush stroke effects.
Still, drawing skill always has revivals, though “golden ages” are over. One art professor I met, viewing an animated film, commented on how he could see the hand-drawn quality. “This kind hand-crafted animation is making a comeback,” he said. “Everyone is a little tired of the slick stuff, like at Pixar.”
That good advice is reportedly being taken. At art schools today, they no longer use the word “drawing” but instead tout “mark making”; this way, everybody can be a drawing expert. Be that as it may, drawing still remains a specific skill, and viewers recognize someone who truly “can draw.”
Because of that public recognition, perhaps, the illustration departments at many art college often have the highest enrollments. And in more traditional painting, those with illustration degrees seem to rise to the top: At plein air contests around the country, its remarkable how many winners did not study painting in college, but illustration instead.