Mandy Rose Draws (Stick) People

My first ever animation planning sequence. See? Stick figures.

JULY 04, 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'm also learning:

• animation

• how to write fiction

• how to keep my plants alive, despite my determination to kill them

• how to raise children (and keep them alive despite their determination to kill themselves)

• how to run a business, even with my disgust for marketing and my marketed inability to keep numbers and finances straight

• how to be a decent person (not while I'm driving)

• how to stop worrying about everything and finally let God be Himself in my life

• how to laugh instead of being nauseatingly whiny (this might be the hardest lesson to learn so far).

In other words, 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.

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. 

What amazes me most about the human body is that no matter how many life reference pictures I get (I won't admit on here how many I have, but the numbers are somewhere in the high thousands), there’s always something left to draw. The human body is capable of so many incredible amounts and kinds of movement. If I never draw anything else again, I will never get bored.