Animate Charcoal Drawing

I really enjoyed the video we watched last class about the charcoal illustrator. I especially found it easy to relate to his comment on finding that medium to be comfortable/ familiar and the challenge of getting over the fact that it isn't oil painting. I think it's often difficult to try and deviate from what you're previous notions on what art is and how to use materials/ the "status" of materials and then rediscover what art is and those materials as well; for instance using the fact that charcoal doesn't completely erase as a significant part of telling the story rather than seeing it as it's initially viewed, a drawback.

In a sense, his illustrating kind of "freed the material" in that it is no longer locked into a flat picture, frozen, but now (through the process of going back and forth between camera and drawing,) it can move, and he can create a procession of time.

I think time plays a big role in that sense, more so than it would for a traditional 2-D drawing because, as the artist mentioned, you can draw with your thought process changing, so that you can make the drawing can change while your (sometimes subconscious) thoughts change- You can expand one idea into another and another and end up at some point completely different from where you started. With a 2-D drawing, if you're doing a still-life or just drawing from imagination, you still don't know where you'll end up, but you have an idea, and ultimately, (especially with a still-life) what you end up with is more limited because you don't have that element of time to create movement and may not reach that breakthrough point that you may have otherwise.

I'm not saying 2-D drawing is not as good ( they can be just as powerful images without movement ); I'm just amazed at how different and limitless it becomes, especially for the artist, when you add the time element to it.