Visual arts are all about seeing. When you can see something you – in front of you or in your mind – can pursue it: clumsily, haltingly, frustratingly perhaps. This month I suggest a few ideas to help in laying out any kind of drawing.
Working at a casual pace, neither fast nor slow, seems to be where problems creep in. Mistakes get repeated, details missed and feelings and emotions are lost too. We perhaps skip over errors, or worse, reinforce them, never quite throwing pure feeling into a mark. Work languishes in a fog of competing priorities.
Our day-to-day brain gets in the way. You know, that part of our brain filled with to-do lists, conversations, timetables and today, the demands of social media. Our practical day-to-day brain makes assumptions, letting us know what it thinks about all of these marks before we’ve really looked at them to feel the whole. Even more troublesome, the day-to-day brain believes it knows best, better than what the eye sees, better than what the heart feels, and it jumps in and gets it wrong!
Tools for Laying out drawings (you don’t need to stick to just one!)
There are of course, many approaches and all have the same objective: to allocate space appropriately with some visual queues and help your eye get things in the right place. Here are a few useful approaches:
1. Start by drawing (unrecognizable) parts of the drawing.
Here I chose some major elements that help split up the picture space. I focused on three segments of the drawing as shown on the left below. Getting these shapes right was made easier because they are essentially abstract lines – the shapes don’t mean anything and that makes them easier to draw – all without trying to recognize the picture. With these the parts into their proper place completing my interpretation of France’s drawing was made much easier because the segments fitted together nicely.
2. Triangles are your friend.
Verticals and horizontals may work really well for laying out a landscape with a bridge and some trees, as above, however something more is needed when the shapes are more complicated. Invariably superimposing some sort of geometry on a subject can help get the shapes in the right place.
Take Goya’s drawing above. You could certainly put a grid on it, however there’s no convenient (near) verticals and horizontals to help split up the picture space. Here’s where triangles come in – with a group of figures or complex shapes I might use a set of triangles to help lay out the composition:
In this composition there is a very prominent diagonal, so in effect I’ve split up the entire picture space into two triangles. Triangles come in all shapes and sizes and always will harmonize a position – that’s why they are so powerful. Squares, rectangles, polygons, any geometric form can be used to help. Mind you, they all can be broken down into their component triangles too!
3. The Power of Negative Spaces
There’s nothing negative about Negative Spaces. It’s probably the most ineptly named term in the annals of art. Negative space is the space behind the “thing” you are drawing. Focusing on this is a magical way of getting a layout to work. Draw the space behind your subject and an inherent correctness materializes. The reason is that it’s impossible to recognize something that has no meaning – and therefore you just draw it as it is. There’s a saying in realist art: “Draw what you see and not what you know”. When we recognize something and it has meaning, all sorts of non-drawing processes are flying about our brains, making assumptions and all getting in the way of our art.
4. Grid it up!
Placing a grid on a reference and using this to transfer the image is a well known method. At times I’ve used this to scale up some of my own artworks, although I often prefer other more intuitive approaches. I always say that the art starts when the transfer is complete. Image transfer by definition is devoid of gesture. However there’s no point in getting frustrated over dimensions and you are just as free to use a grid as all of the great artists that came before!
The following describes the method: https://www.art-is-fun.com/grid-method
5. Some other ideas
- Turn both your work and reference upside-down and so draw the image upside down
- Use your non-drawing hand – this definitely gets you out of your comfort zone and you will be surprised how well you can draw.
- Look at your work in a mirror briefly, the brain has to re-recognize the drawing and you see all the problems
- Squint, take your glasses off, turn the lights down, use sunglasses or look through a slightly frosted surface – all of these reduce detail and help focus on the things to change
- Draw corrected shapes before erasing the old – that way you don’t repeat “mistakes”
- Exaggerate corrections – and then revise. It’s easier to knock things back into shape than create forms that are missing in the first place.
A few Plein-air tips:
Include something firm to support your work, keeping in mind that we will be outside without studio equipment. I use a smaller format, normally 15″x11″ maximum. Plein Air painting is all about sensing the atmosphere – if, like me, you tend to include the proverbial kitchen sink, I recommend that you keep your kit simple and suggest you split your kit into “Outside” and “inside” parts. Should you be using stretched canvas, it’s a good idea to have an opaque backing board – a back lit canvas is very hard to work with!
Here are a few other things to consider bringing:
- • Something to sit on, such as a small cushion or a fold-up stool or chair. There will sometimes be a convenient picnic table or wall;
- • Sunscreen, a sunhat and sunglasses;
- • Something windproof and layers in case it cools;
- • Something to drink
- • A bag to put rubbish in, such as dirty pieces of paper towel;
- • A large plastic bag as an emergency rain shield;
- • A camera for recording the scene.