1.
Hand, Eye and Mind
Before you start to draw, you will need to organize yourself, your equipment, and the model. It is important that you arrange the best possible situation in which to draw. Position yourself so that you can see the whole figure. Place your drawing paper on a firm board and fix it with clips, masking tape, or pins. Then position the board so that the look from the figure to the drawing involves just a slight turn of your head. Do not position the board in front of the figure or you’ll have to move to see around it.
If you are using 22- x 30-in paper (which is recommended for the projects), it is best to stand at an easel. If an easel is not available you can make do, but try to stand far enough away from the drawing while you work so that you can see all, or the greater part of it, in one view. If this is impossible, keep moving back from the drawing to look at it from a distance. Also, try to organize your position so that the hand you draw with is the one furthest from the model. Your drawing arm will not then obstruct your view. See that the paper is at a good height: your eye line should be about one-thid of the way down from the top of the paper. This will avoid the distortion, called error of parallax, that occurs when you look at a sheet of paper at an acute angle.
PRELIMINARY DRAWING
One twenty-minute drawing
Materials: 22- x 30-in paper, pencil or charcoal
When you are ready, start on an undirected drawing of a figure. Imagine you are in a class situation and draw continuously for twenty minutes. Do not exceed the time allotted and do not renege on the drawing. When the twenty minutes are up, consider the following questions:
• What were you trying to convey in the drawing?
• What did you convey?
• What eluded you?
• Were there other ways in which you could have captured it?
• How were you drawing – in terms both of looking at the model and making the drawing?
• What would you have done differently if the drawing time were longer – six hours, say?
• What would you have done in five minutes?
• Would you take more care over the six-hour drawing? In what way?
Would you make it more accurate?
If so, what does that mean and why is it desirable?
And how could it be achieved?
A drawing is a product of the time in which it is done, and its speed of production is part of its meaning, so the way you look and draw needs to be appropriate to the time you have. Keep the drawing you have done as a comparison for what comes later.
The projects in this section require you to place yourself in a number of unorthodox situations in your confrontation with both the model and your drawings in an attempt to encourage you to reflect on the mechanics and mechanisms of drawing – sense and motor-sense, looking and the process of looking, pencil and paper. The projects will also help you see drawing as an attempt to understand what it means to draw in terms of the optical, mental, and physical apparatus involved. It would be churlish not to admit that the projects are also an attempt to break down, or at least question, preconceptions and ingrained habits that you may have about drawing.
At the same time, these exercises are intended to be fun and should be approached in that spirit, because it is through lighthearted disruptions of our normal methods of drawing that we can open up new questions and opportunities. Please try to shed any restricting expectations, such as trying to match the look of another drawing. Drawing is a creative process; it is not the matching of something that already exists. To try to do so is affected and mannered and has no place in “real” drawing. Having said that, during the process of drawing you will experience times when what you have in the drawing does not accord with what you feel you should have. This is inherent in the creative act. Stick with it because it is essential to progress the drawing beyond these points. You will not know what is possible in a drawing unless you have a determination to push it beyond its sticky moments.
THE GESTURE
A gesture is an action that has significance – the gift of a bunch of flowers, or the movement of a pencil on a sheet of paper. In drawing, gesture is the action of the hand and drawing tool as they follow the movement of the eye while it scans the figure.
The activity of looking is selective and goal-directed: the eye darts over the field of vision, seeking and selecting pertinent features in the field and dovetailing these with the mind’s means of making sense of them. The gestural drawing is one that follows the eye’s search for meaning; it should be a quick search, seeing and placing the whole figure almost at once.
Project One
GESTURAL DRAWINGS
Three five-minute drawings; take a full five minutes for each drawing
Materials: 22- x 30-in or newsprint paper, pencil
Use your 22- x 30-in sheet of paper in landscape format so that you can get all three drawings on one sheet. Ask the model to take a different pose for each drawing. Once the model is posed, draw with speed and pressure.
Try to get all or most of the figure on the page. Ensure that you draw at a reasonable scale in relation to the size of the paper. You need to approach this exercise with confidence. Fear for and of a drawing results in a reduction in scale and timid marks on the paper.
You have absolutely nothing to lose – unless you count the cost of a sheet of paper. Regard your hand as connected to your eye; do not fix your sight or pencil on detail, but work from the general to the specific. Let your pencil work through the drawing with a cursive line, swinging from top to bottom and side to side until the figure is drawn out.
It is obvious from the illustrations that there is no recourse to outline. At times, when students try this type of drawing, they declare that they cannot see the lines they are drawing. That is the case with any type of drawing. This confusion arises from a tendency to confuse the drawing with the real world. The lines you are drawing should relate to the way in which you are looking. They should be infused with seeing, following the eye as it roves across the figure. In effect, this type of drawing is a scribble, but it is not an affectation or imposition. It relates directly to seeing.
Project Two
GESTURAL DRAWINGS
One three-minute drawing, one one-minute drawing, and one five-minute drawing
Materials: 22- x 30-in or newsprint paper, pencil
Do another three drawings, taking different lengths of time over each. The different times allocated for the three poses demonstrate the stages in seeing and depicting more obviously. It is important that the one-minute and five-minute drawings both capture the whole figure. Again, in these drawings you should move from the whole to the particular.
Project Three
HAND-EYE COORDINATION
Two five-minute gestural drawings
Materials: 22- x 30-in or newsprint paper, pencil
In these two drawings your eyes should be on the model continuously while you work. All the time that your pencil is moving, you should be looking at the model. Although this is difficult, try not to cheat. You can look at your drawing a couple of times, but not while your pencil is on the paper.
What we are attending to here is hand-eye coordination. When playing tennis, if you are to do it well, you watch and address the ball. You do not watch the racquet on its path to the ball. You know that your arm will act in accordance with information from the eye and instructions from the brain. The same type of sense is highly developed in most artists.
Project Four
GESTURAL DRAWING – UNFAVORED HAND
Two five-minute drawings
Materials: 22- x 30-in or newsprint paper, pencil
The movements of your favored hand are rooted in habit – from writing, work, or other kinds of drawing – whereas the unfavored hand will open up the creative, less predetermined side of drawing.
The drawings in this project are to be done with your unfavored hand. If you are left-handed, use your right hand, and if right-handed use your left hand. The lines made in these drawings will have an expressive quality lacking in drawings made with the favored hand, and this approach will help you develop an expressiveness that can only emerge when your intentioning faculties are suspended.
THE CONTINUOUS LINE
The continuous line is much as it sounds. The drawing is done continuously and at a constant speed without lifting the hand from the paper. Progress through the drawing rhythmically, continuously comparing the elements and features of the figure and setting to each other. Here the line is produced more slowly than in a gestural drawing. Rather than being a scribble, the drawing looks as if it has been executed with a length of wire. (You could consider realizing some of your completed continuous-line drawings in wire.)
Project Five
CONTINUOUS-LINE DRAWING
Three five-minute drawings
Materials: 22- x 30-in or newsprint paper; pencil, conté crayon, or charcoal pencil
For each of these drawings, place your pencil on the paper and convince yourself that it is a particular point on the model. Move your eye and hand at a steady rate around the model, locating the features without looking at the drawing. You will have to move over areas without edges in your search, comparing and locating points in relation to each other as you go. The rough proportions of the figure will become established in this search.
Project Six
HOLDING THE DRAWING IMPLEMENT
Three five-minute drawings
Materials: 22- x 30-in or newsprint paper; pencil, charcoal, felt-tip or ballpoint pen
The different movements of our bodies create different marks on paper, so we need to question further the actions involved in making a drawing. We can generate marks through movements of the fingers, or from the wrist, elbow, or shoulder, or even the whole body. Try all approaches, and you will find that each demands that you draw on a different scale and brings about a different type of expressiveness. The following exercises explore the different ways in which a drawing tool can be held and moved.
First, hold the drawing implement like a dagger being used in a crime of passion: in the palm of the hand with your fingers wrapped around it and the drawing point by your little finger. Draw for five minutes with a continuous line.
Then, hold the pencil between your thumb and index finger as far away from the drawing point as possible. Draw for five minutes.
Finally, do a drawing without using your hands – try holding the implement in your mouth (make sure you are not using charcoal!) or foot. Again, draw for five minutes.
THE LINE DRAWING OR LINE CONTOUR
The line drawing or line contour needs to be done with a confident, incisive line. Do not use a feathered line – one that moves back on itself before proceeding again – as this type of line doesn’t overcome any of the problems that it tries to overcome. It just reflects its own uncertainty. A line drawing requires confidence and arrogance on the part of the artist because you have to believe that you are going to get it right. (Your untutored drawing may have been an attempt at a line drawing.)
The question that you need to ask yourself while doing this type of drawing is: where is the line actually going? The silhouette is a good starting point for this enquiry because it shows the edge that is made where the surface of the figure curves away, out of sight.
Project Seven
SILHOUETTE DRAWING
One ten-minute drawing
Materials: 22- x 30-in or newsprint paper; pencil, charcoal, or conté crayon; plastic eraser
This drawing has links with the continuous line in that the outside edges of the figure should be described with a continuous line, but one that is made more deliberately and more slowly than the continuous line as you used it in the previous two projects.
In a silhouette drawing, the line must not enter the form at any point, but you should draw the spaces between, for example, arm and body through which you can see the background – known as the negative spaces. You can use an eraser to correct mistakes.
Project Eight
POSTURE
Three three-minute drawings
Materials: 22- x 30-in or newsprint paper; pencil, charcoal, or conté crayon; plastic eraser
In this project, lines are used to capture the model’s posture. Posture lines have little to do with the silhouette, but instead record the way the pose is held, describing and accenting the angles made by and between different parts of the body: for example, the angles across the shoulders, down the middle of the body, across the top part of the body, along the limbs, across the brow, and down the middle of the face. The result is a drawing that looks a little like a stick figure.
Project Nine
DISTILLING A LINE
Three three-minute drawings
Materials: 22- x 30-in or newsprint; pencil, charcoal, or conté crayon; plastic eraser
To distill the pose to its essential lines, find one line to follow that describes the pose as fully as possible.
The line can move from the silhouette through the posture. This exercise is linked to the continuous-line drawing in that it runs from one edge to another across the form, using an opportune feature to do so. Then add two more lines to the first to give a clearer indication of the whole pose. The lines should have confidence and dynamism.
Project Ten
THE LINE OR LINE-CONTOUR DRAWING
Three twenty-minute drawings
Materials: 22- x 30-in paper, pencil or felt-tip pen
Line can be used to describe the edge of a form, working with the line on the other side to encompass the whole form.
The silhouette drawing works if the lines around the figure continue across the masses they are describing so as to cup them. If a mime artist were to act out catching a ball, his two hands would work together to hold it. They would cup the ball, each hand forming a convex arc around the sphere of the ball. In a similar way, the line drawing seeks to describe the volume of the trunk, head and limbs by using the line and its inflection (the line on the other side of the form) to capture the form. However, it is a little more complex than that. The figure is not a puppet; the limbs, body, and head are not composed of simple, standard volumes (see Building Blocks, pages 37–44). Muscle, fat, and bone also need to be described. The drawing on the previous page shows how the line can break away from the silhouette and enter the form to seek such internal volumes. Using a line in this way, you can explore how one form sits in front of another.
Bodybuilders seek to build their muscles up so that they are dramatically “cut” – the muscles are clearly defined through the skin. In using a line to describe a contour, you are bringing the line into the form to seek the edges of the volume of muscle or fat – in other words, using the “cut” of the form to describe how one volume sits in front of another. Make sure that the illusion of overlap works the right way to show which volume sits in front of which.
Do three line-contour drawings with pencil or pen, spending twenty minutes on each one.
Project Eleven
THE CONTINUOUS LINE AS A NET
Three fifteen-minute drawings
Materials: 22- x 30-in paper, pencil
In these final drawings, you are going to revert to the continuous line and use it to lasso the environment and model with a fluid, roving line that moves around the whole arena of observation. Your eye, and the line, should seek to locate features and work out relationships freely and intuitively.
