Visual arts are all about seeing. When you can see something you can pursue it: clumsily, haltingly, frustratingly perhaps. However, if you can’t see a glimmer of that thing, all the skills in the world are for naught. Michelangelo said “I saw an angel in the marble and set him free”. In this course I’ll cover some sound drawing and watercolour skills as well as a few ideas about creativity and visualizing.
A Young Girl by Ambrose McEnvoy
A few years back, whilst browsing an exhibition of the Tate U.K.’s collection of drawings, I noticed this little study by a lesser known artist Ambrose McEnvoy (1878-1927). Simple and effective in many ways, it shows the essence of image making. The almost arbitrary sweep of the gestural brush, clean contour definition for the profile and the simple blocking of values (light, mid-tone and dark), display three essential elements of drawing.
For me, a good drawing invariably carries some gesture, an immediacy that comes of the artist’s initial response to the subject. As the song goes: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!
A clean definition, in places, is essential, and this would be my second tenet. The ability to follow a contour is an exercise in pure observation.
Thirdly, drawings have presence through solidity of modelling with good values (light and dark), very often as simple as possible. Edward Manet advised to model the lightest lights and darkest darks, commenting that often little was then required in between.
In this simple study, McEnvoy’s study has all of these, plus it’s completed with a simple wash. No wonder I like it!
The Gesture
Let’s start the course with some quick and intuitive sketches – not so much drawing as responding. When you start thinking, focusing and taking your marks seriously, the gestural quality will quickly disappear. I often start with little more than squiggles, it’s a lot of fun:
Perhaps most commonly applied to the figure drawing, a gestural approach can equally be applied to any subject:
If you can draw and paint it, there is an opportunity for gesture. I’m not going to describe exactly how to approach a gesture – it’s a personal approach: a quickly executed and intuitive response. It imbues work with a free flowing beauty that shines on in more developed studies. I commence many art classes with gestural work. It’s a great warm-up to any studio session, however the enduring value is to underpin your longer studies and finished works. A couple of articles elaborate:
https://www.craftsy.com/blog/2014/03/gesture-drawing/
http://thevirtualinstructor.com/gesturedrawing.html
Exercise
- Take subjects around the house, on video or from reference images and quickly complete 10 gestural studies – each under 2 minutes… if you can, in under one minute! By all means nest some together on one or two large pages.
- Choose a couple of these studies and continue working for perhaps a further 5 minutes each…don’t start again…work over the gestural studies that you have started…this keeps things fresh.
Laying out drawings
Now that we’re all warmed-up, I’d like to cover some basic ideas for laying out drawings. In the following video I describe an approach:
The key is to organize your picture space before you commence too much detail drawing. It’s always a good idea to have your drawing nicely positioned on the page and a taking a little extra time to understand how the overall image is going to be spaced as this helps things that follow flow naturally.
With reference photos, cropping for paint-suitability and size-appropriateness is invariably a good idea too. Many photos, even professionally taken photos, do not necessarily make the best compositions in paint. Establishing an overall layout for your drawing is also an opportunity to make adjustments that might make sense vis-a-vis your reference.
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. Divide and conquer.
Choose some major elements that help split up the picture space. This is what I did in the above video, choosing a few trees and the bridge and getting them positioned first, before moving to establish much detail. If you do this quickly it might retain something of a gestural feel too!
2. 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
3. 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!
4. 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.
Exercise
- Take one of the references above (or one of your own choosing – perhaps from the Reference Gallery) and develop a drawing in the medium of your choice.
- Use one or more of the approaches above to lay out the overall drawing. Should you have some additional approach you would like to share let me know and add it to the lesson!
- At some point in your drawing, place it to the side and complete a couple of squiggle drawings on a piece of scrap paper.. Resume your drawing – notice how your drawing implement is somehow a little freer!
- Perhaps add a flourish at completion to retain a gestural element!