Marshall Vandruff | Home – Creativity & Craft in the Arts

George Bridgman created some of the most powerful, authoritative, Michelangeloish figures of any drawing teacher I know since Michelangelo. Many drawing teachers are not the best practitioners. George was. Remarkably so.
The drawings are anything but slick. They’re rugged. But they showcase mastery of anatomy and structure — what a body is made of and how it occupies space....

Making Storytelling Easier
Whether you like story templates or don’t, this is my last thought on what I think is their first problem: they give students the illusion that they will make story-crafting easy, or fast, or less messy. On paper, the recipe looks simple. In the kitchen...

Templates & Formulas
Story templates are not new to the 21st century. In the 1930’s, The Plot Genie helped writers assemble a plot with a spinning wheel and lists of situations.[1. It is back in print, and if you use it and like it, please let me know.] I tried it decades...

A Glut of Knowledge
When screenwriting books became popular in the 1980’s, I was ready for them. Here is a recollection.
I started with Syd Field’s Screenplay, which I read cover to cover twice. He taught that a story has a predictable structure based on three acts. In that first edition, he even made a big deal about act reversals happening on particular page numbers...