DRAWING CLASS 101

The eye can pick out almost microscopic detail. It's just about all ignored. Instead a seemingly random succession of detail springs into focus. The headline at a newsstand. The cockroach that scurries across my path. Some of the detail I purposefully seek. When driving I look for potholes on the road surface.  A figure can emerge from my peripheral vision as undefined. Moving my head from right to left I can read it's true shape, correcting the distortion of perspective. Reassured my attention shifts to thoughts, sounds or other distractions. My surroundings are a general blur, front, back and sides. However, when I draw I am only concerned with the view directly facing me. I am looking through an imaginary viewfinder. 

Drawing is very tiring so I do it as quickly as possible. The initial impression is the most difficult to grasp. A good painting will instantly give a sense of place. To do that the range of tones, colors have to be limited. Just as the camera has settings for snow, bright sun, overcast sky. With line drawing, the objects drawn are all arranged within a perspective which is the wider shape beyond the viewfinder. In a blink I'll divide my view into clusters. The sky and all the clouds might be one cluster, the ground and everything on it another. Just memorizing position and size, and ignoring shapes and details.

With the position and size memorized I'll try to register the shapes of each cluster, just  the outline of the cluster, no details.  A dinning table is a square but viewed in perspective it will look diamond-shaped. A person crouched over might look like an umbrella or a crab. Teachers resort to figurative language. Willard Spiegelman gives the example of dance teachers who try to communicate a move or position. "It's like kicking a bit of dirt from the bottom of your shoe."; "It's like turning your wrist quickly to look at your watch."  Any how-to-draw book will guide the viewer step-by-step from simple to complex shapes.

Within a second I'll have in my imagination all the shapes, positions and size of the clusters that completely fill my view. At this point I'll draw the outlines on the paper. The drawing will look very abstract, unrecognizable. 


In the Libyan Sibyl or another of the finished drawings of Michelangelo  the figure actually pop out of the page. Something you cannot see in a reproduction in a book. Technically, drawing doesn't get any better. You also see that the artist used box-like background figures before drilling down into the detail.

Now I can take a breath and look at each cluster separately. Again, first the big groups, their size, position and then the shapes. For example, the coat of the person would be one group of details within the larger cluster. I'll ignore the buttons and pockets.

Although I know a coat has arms, from my perspective I might not see the arms. It might be more the shape of bag. I'll draw that, and then repeat the process for the next cluster, say the table. My drawing should be somewhat recognizable by now and give the illusion of space.

Just following these steps does not guarantee a great drawing. As with the example of the person who looks like an umbrella, these shapes are metaphors. The very best artists know how to make the details come alive on the paper. This comes with practice. The animals in the movie Ice Age are fun to look without the talk. The best cartoonist knows how warp appearances but without a self-conscious zaniness. Much of video game art should take better advantage of the tricks of the trade found in old-fashion museum painting.  James Woods talks of natural storytellers who can fill their pages with just the right details to "sound a voice, shape a plot, siphon the fizz of suspense."

Let's go back to these shapes.  Bueno Ares, 1947, Miguel Najdorf played blindfolded simultaneously some forty games of chess. He won 39 of the games. How can he keep in his imagination that many games? Geoff Calvin in his book "Talent is Overrated" answers that by asking you to try to remember 13 random letters, which you have only a few seconds to view. This is near impossible but if you know the letters spell familiar word, you don't have to remember each letter.

Similarly, If you are doing a line drawing of a tree you don't have to remember every branch. If you've already know the shape of a tree, you know the position an direction of the branches. If you've drawn a lot of landscape, you know the difference in how branches extend on the walnut, the birch, the maple. The lines you put on the paper represent shape. If you know the shapes you know what metaphors to choose. This is why the best training for drawing that conveys debth, is not drawing at all but clay modeling.

This process for line drawing is the same for color. You go from the big to the small. Color has three qualities that can be independently scaled from each other. Hue is the graduation of the rainbow, red, yellow, blue, secondary colors and others. Color saturation points to the purity from brilliant to drab. Thirdly, color tone from white to black is separate from saturation. Hues have a natural tone. Blue looks darker than red, which looks darker than yellow. If you place a dark, almost brown yellow next to a pale blue, the colors appear to vibrate. Trees are green, the sky is blue, shadows black. However if I compare the color in the trees with the sky I might see the sky as more violet, or green even. The trees as blue.

Lines don't exist in the real world. They are a shorthand for representing space. All the eye sees is light and dark. Shape is space on a human scale. Stereoscopic vision impowers a monkey to see into the future. She can anticipate the collision with a tree trunk before it occurs. In Dean Buonomano writes that the brain has learned to make to use the convergence to make inferences about distance. The artist can create perspective by simply drawing two converging lines on a piece of paper.  The same is true of movement. There has to be a foreground and background with one still, the other in a shifted position.