From Walt Stanchfield's Gesture Drawing for Animation, a favorite around here:

It all starts with preparation, which is the “open sesame” of all genius. Even the geniuses admit it’s 99% hard work and 1% genius.

In context, this is talking about capturing "The Essence" of an image. For the layman to a craft, it's what they would imagine is most of the work going into the piece. The emotion, the story, the idea.

Starting to learn drawing a few years ago, I thought ideas would be the hard part. Turned out that I had ideas pouring out of my ears! Enough so that I couldn't keep up with them all.

And so the idea is the easy part. Most of the time is spent in the trenches, working with craft.

A gesture is accomplished through a complex array of skills working in tandem: composition, perspective, anatomy, construction, expression, draftsmanship, inking, shading, and value. And each of those are sophistications unto itself.

This is, mostly, relieving. Craft can be improved, and craft is much more sustainable to work at over a long stretch of time. I find craft to be grounding; it's the thing that aligns you with the beauty of it all, and it's the way we become the image, the piece, and so on.

I write this as I'm slowing the pace of output on this ol' dot com so I can spend more time learning and honing craft. I'm trading finished works for etude books and study material. It's a quiet learning sabbatical, with occasional transmissions from the underground where the roots are being laid. With time, some nice fruit should bloom from it. But until then, on with craft.