New Book: The Visual Language of Drawing

I also thought I'd mention that I've been reading the new book from the Art Students League this week: The Visual Language of Drawing. I'm most of the way through and have mixed feelings about it. It's written in such high Academic language that my poor, simple little brain implodes after just reading a few sentences. I will probably have to re-read it at some point. Most of it goes way over my head. I feel that if the idea of the book was to educate the general public on the various principles of drawing then it's a bit of a failure. Or maybe I'm just dumb. Possibly the latter.

There's some interesting ideas in it, for instance: never erasing a mistake before you've corrected it on the page but in general I can't really follow it. Amazing how in depth people look at Art? Maybe I'm not there yet, I doubt I ever will be, I just enjoy learning. When drawing starts getting Academic and teaching gets opinionated to the nth degree, I start to feel uneasy. But I think it's important to read everything you can about it. There are some people in this book that don't like Bridgeman. I do, though the smaller Dover books have terrible printing, he's helped me a lot.

Life Drawing

If I can be pleased with one thing recently, it's that I've manged an entire month of regular life drawing. I had hoped that this would provide a fair amount of material to post on this blog but in reality, despite all of the things I have taught myself and learned over the past 2 years, it has been a real struggle.

I think this goes to show that there is quite a difference between knowing all the theory and actually doing. I think you need a healthy amount of both. Certainly knowing my anatomy well helps me see things and I have a good handle on materials etc but you have to be careful you don't neglect one area in favor of the other.

I've set up some rules. One is that I only use charcoal, I actually take very little with me to class and I think it helps. I have a tendency to reach for other pencils when a drawing doesn't go well and this forces me to focus back on the drawing. The other rule is to measure. I was very strict last week that I really measure properly and that I was really looking at the model. You would be amazed how easy it is to look at the model and not really focus. You skip the hard parts you don't want to draw. I used a bamboo skewer, a piece of card with head lengths measured on it and plum lines on the drawing itself. Most people had an almost finished drawing well before me but I stuck to my plan and most of the shading you see here is actually done in the last 15 minutes of a 1.5 hour pose.

I got caught up in some measuring mistakes and I got bogged down in certain areas. I should really have got more of the head, hands and feet done- I've been trying to get through the whole figure in passes and not skip any bits. I have squashed his crotch for instance and made him too wide, I had tried marking the top of the page, the bottom and then working into the center. I was making a real effort to place to place him well on the page and my measuring isn't quite there yet but it will come with practice.

So this drawing below has a lot of mistakes, it's far from good but I was very happy with it: for the first time I could see things beginning to work and that's a great feeling.

Back From The Dead

Haven't seen one of these in a while have we? Well yes, my bad, lately it seems that getting time for art has been impossible, I've either been shattered from work, parenting or a combination of the two. I've also felt the strain of being pulled in several different directions, on one hand I want to develop my ZBrush and 3D (lack of) skills and on the other there's drawing and the traditional art. There isn't time for all of it unfortunately.

Drawing has it at the moment and I'm glad because I missed it a lot. I'm going to try and get back to regular blog posts. Two things are apparent: I need to get to a life drawing class each week or I won't progress and I need to get out and do some plein air sketching. I've been reading James Gurney's book on colour and also picked up a book of Charles Dana Gibson's ink drawings which has got the creative juices flowing again.

So here we have some more thumbnail tonal sketches, using charcoal and about 5x3 in size- so pretty small.I figure that in a tight week I should at least be able to so a few of these and they're useful to do. I should probably make some colour thumbnails as well to help develop my colour sense.

When at first you loose confidence, go draw in a museum

The way I see it, there have been several barriers to get through, the first was getting back to drawing and getting over my crisis of confidence, then I had to understand some of the processes and principles involved ie. the basics I never knew about, followed by some pretty intensive anatomy study. Now it's the turn of having the guts to go and sketch in a public place.

A recent trip to London was an opportunity to go drawing at the British Museum and that's just what a friend and I did. I just forced myself to do it and guess what? I managed and not only that I enjoyed it, I really enjoyed it.

To me, this is important for so many reasons. One is that while drawing outside the comfort of your own home you are limited. You can't take every bit of equipment you own, you need to travel light. Sometimes by limiting things, you discover what is important. I stuck to pencil and ink, using brush pen for the core shadows, adding the white pen I found was difficult as you can't get different values out of it and you almost immediately over-do it, trying ink and wash on this particular sketch pad was tricky. Also this sketch pad is not a perfect mid tone. So in a very short space of time I had learned a lot of things that don't work and stripped everything right down to basics. In the end I found myself kind of taking notes on the drawing: where is the core shadow, the reflected light, cast shadow, lightest light and darkest dark, then I finished off the drawings later using some of the knowledge I've picked up in the past year.

The middle drawing is a bit of a failure but I've included it anyway, it's important to realise that there will be a lot of bad drawings before there are good ones but in a way that isn't the point. The point is that this particular barrier is down, you can't get better without doing these things.

Selections from a sketchbook

Lately I've been doing a lot of sketchbook work. Most of the time, if I get home from work and only have 30 mins or an hour to draw I will open the anatomy sketchbook and do a bit of study on various things just to keep my brain up to date. This book stayed in a a cupboard for 8 years while I gave up drawing and it's nice to be filling it with something finally.

 I'm happy to say I've found another art class (http://www.whitespace11.com/drop-in-life-drawing.php) and have been going every Thursday evening. 5 mins from work and with a bus that takes me straight home accross the road it couldn't be more ideal. It's been great to get back to it because no matter how much you study in a sketchbook at home, nothing replaces drawing from life.

Not too much to show for my efforts from that just yet but hopefully it won't be long. I've found that my ability to look and see what I'm looking at (muscles, landmarks etc) is a lot better but my ability with materials such as charcoal needs a bit of practice. I think my main issue is hesitation and lack of knowledge, confidence unfortunately plays a big part in good drawing.

The only downside would be that the class is only 2 hours but it's enough and it lets me figure out what areas I need to work on and then I can come back the next week and try again. It is fairly quiet too compared to the Sunday class; I have always been more relaxed in an empty class than a full one- being relaxed is pretty important for drawing imo.

Semi Successful Atmospheric Perspective

Having heard about atmospheric perspective recently, I wanted to give it a go, so I decided to do this study based on a Rubens painting. Atmospheric perspective basically means that where one object is behind another, it will fade into the backround, almost like a mist I guess. It's similar to the principle of lost edges but not quite the same thing. The original painting doesn't have it but it was a good pose to test it out.

In fact, personal study wise, I have changed the way I do things. I warm up by doing a page in my anatomy sketch book and then I do a study based on  a Masterwork. I was worried that I was concentrating too much on anatomy and in reality I think it's probably best to have several things going at once- that way I don't get too complacent in one area. That has been the hard thing this year, I have been essentially setting my own curriculum; everyone says 'Draw, draw, draw' but draw what? In what order? How do you build up your skill from nothing/ very little? So a lot of the time you have to keep yourself in check.

A few things went wrong. For one I labored over it too long but I did take breaks. Also, yet again, the importance of knowing how your materials behave raised it's ugly head. I was drawing with a Chamios leather cloth, rubbing in the gesture and then using that as a guide to do a more accurate drawing. After that, you pick out the lights with a putty rubber and then add your core shadows. But even though I used a good paper it was impossible to rub out the lights back to the white of the paper. So the drawing is mostly shadow and mid value because I couldn't get the highlight tone.

I did another small test on Bristol board and that seemed to rub out better. I considered using white gouache to paint the highlights but I wasn't sure it would look right and I decided to leave it and put it down to experience.

More Tonal Studies

 Some more tonal studies this week, all John Singer Sargent. Some didn't photograph so well as I took them in a bit of a rush, sorry. Some more successfull than others, in general all are still way too overdone, really they are supposed to be simple maps of the tonal values in a picture but I can't quite stop myself making them into finished little drawings.

 And little they are, comming in at A6 in size. I had originally thought that this would keep me from trying to finish them too much but nope...still do. I have to stop myself being so fussy with them. Trying to add too much detail at this size with charcoal is just too difficult, the third drawing was a real problem and took way too long for what it is.

  But I enjoy these, they're very good for learning, my next sketchbook might go up a size to A5 to help but I'll have to be quite diciplined that this doesn't lead to me putting in even more detail. A recent class taken by painters Linda and Barry Atherton suggested breaking the whole picture into three basic tones and that's the way I've tried to start these. I find my darkest dark and block that in fairly early; it means that if you get it wrong your drawing is hosed but I find although you're meant to build a drawing upwards in gentle steps, if you don't commit at some point you never will. I don't however block in the lightest light until the very end, in fact a lot of paintings I've looked at are quite restrained in how they use highlights.