Working It Out

This page shows me noodling with a marker. It’s a demo, not on how to do this right, but how to keep working at it.
The class was facing a still life set up and we were discussing composition. How can you make this pile of pots into an interesting, dynamic composition on the page? I said, I don’t know, let’s see, how would I go at this. I taped an 11 x 17 piece of gloss paper to a drawing board and did one take after another. I gained some insight from one failure after another. I started on the left with a big drawing and worked towards the right edge of the paper, until, finally it came together. So that the small frame at the lower right felt like a resolution: it has some life.
This was scribbling, staying with it, working it out. It seems obvious that this is what you need to do. But students usually think that when they tape a piece of paper to their drawing board, they’re going to produce a work of genius. This is it. This may be my big breakthrough. Well, yes, it might be. But it’s all part of a work process and you have to be prepared to slug it out with your drawing tool. Something may develop on your paper but it’s more important that something develop in your mind.
A page like this takes about a minute, certainly less than two. When I do this, I have no thought of producing anything wonderful or impressive or frame-worthy. I just draw furiously, trying to make the elements hang together, trying to understand–visually–what I’m working with. I risk failure all the time and you can see the evidence of that on this page. Risk-taking focuses the mind.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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Twenty Minutes to Turn Your Head Around

In my drawing class I like to sit next to students and draw along.  Well, first I ask for permission because sometimes people just want to noodle by themselves.  When they invite me in, I sometimes draw quietly, but most of the time there are questions and then I comment on what I’m doing, what to look for, how to connect this and that, etc.

I recently worked with Jackie, a new student, who was drawing from a magazine photo of a standing figure.  Without further comment, I’ll just let the “before” and “after” speak for themselves.

When I’m drawing, I lose all sense of time.  I think we worked together for about twenty minutes.  That is to say, I drew and demonstrated how to approach the figure, how to put the contrapposto lines down first, why leaving the head to last is a good idea (so counter-intuitive!), how to put in the T-face, do side studies of hands, see the V-shape in the hand, see the plumb line between the neck and the heel to make the figure stand convincingly…stuff like that.  Doesn’t take long.

After my tutorial, she produced a much-improved drawing and brushed her “before” drawing aside. “So much better,” she said. Reflecting on her former teachers, she added, “I have to tell you, all art teachers are not created equal.”

Somebody had an aha-moment.

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

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http://facefame.wordpress.com

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Head Study from Ad

How hard is it to get somebody to sit still for you?  Very.  For free? Forget it.  The going rate for models at art schools is $45-$50/hr. You can’t afford that, just for your own practice.  So that’s out. But you need to and want to draw faces, hands, the figure.

Look around you.  You’re actually inundated with images.  The photography in magazines is excellent.  Some of it, of course, is touched up to a bland, lifeless  perfection.  But much advertising is excellent.  Part of your visual self-education involves spotting the good stuff.  A good image to work from has distinctive shadows, motion and asymmetry.

I bring magazine clippings to class for us to work from.  When it was demo time a couple of weeks ago, a student pulled out this clipping. My demo was about the versatility of the Aquarellable Pencil, using two tones, sepia and black and then going in with a wet brush.  Notice how the unpredictability of the wash adds character and depth to the face, which otherwise might have gone into the bland, lifeless direction.

(Btw, this was the demo that inspired Karen to make the three face studies I presented in the previous post.)

Moral: there’s no excuse to go for a day without drawing.

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

www.khilden.com 

http://facefame.wordpress.com

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Drawing Drapery: History and Demo

Drapery got interesting about the same time that flesh got interesting.  To paint, that is.  Probably around the middle of the 15^th century, when oil painting was invented.  Jan Van Eyck is often credited with this invention, but there’s no proof.  Anyway, oil painting, with its slow drying time, made blending and shading in infinite nuances possible.  Painting flesh and drapery is all about nuances, creating the illusion of roundness with infinite variety.

When I plan on giving a demo on drawing drapery, I bring in some art books to illustrate where we come from (#1 in the class photo):  drapery as rendered in byzantine art, then in 12^th century, and then in the 16^th and 17th century when drapery came into its own.  In Caravaggio (d.1610)  and Van Dyck  (d.1641) you can see that drapery was a joy to paint and that it serves an important expressive function.  In this Caravaggio tableau, the red drapery at the top is pure invention, ridiculous in a way, if you’re literal minded, but he clearly uses it to add vitality to the dreary scene.

The demo is done on the brown paper (#2) with thick charcoal to illustrate how light behaves on a round object.  Then I sit next to individual students and draw along with them, addressing their particular questions and stumbling blocks. One student went from I-don’t-get-it to wow! (Heather’s is the first of the student drawings shown below.)

The still life, a humble pile of white cloth and some drab pottery (#3), inspires the students and challenges them to create a lively illusion of billowing forms.

(Click images for enlargements.)————————————————————————–

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

www.khilden.com

http://facefame.wordpress.com

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Could Leonardo da Vinci draw, really?

You know at first glance that this is a fine drawing.  There are three possible reasons why you might come to that conclusion:  1) you’re seeing it in a museum, at Buckingham Palace, or reproduced in a book on Leonardo da Vinci and, therefore, you assume this must be worth looking at; 2) you’ve looked at a lot of art and you’ve trained your eye to recognize good work; or 3) you’re an artist yourself, at whatever level of accomplishment.

I’m, of course, addressing all of you who fall into categories two and especially three, those of you who really LOOK.

Since you’re taking the time to really look and enjoy this drawing, you’ll notice all sorts of lines that appear to be redundant.  Some of them are faint, but they’re there.  To make them more visible, I placed transparent paper over the drawing and traced these redundant lines.  Now, you are fully aware that this drawing of a young woman is by the great Leonardo da Vinci and you ask yourself, quite naturally, if this guy was so great, why didn’t he get the contour of the face right the first time, why are there three lines instead of one line that is sure and RIGHT?  And the neck.  What’s with all those lines!  Hey, Leonardo, you’re so great, just do it!  Get it right the first time.  We want to admire your greatness.  We don’t need to see your hesitation, your thought process, your scribbling, your explorations.

But we do.  It’s precisely because we see all those apparently redundant lines that we enjoy the drawing.   Let’s call them “exploratory lines.”  The great Leonardo is exploring.  His model has arrived, he sits down at his drawing board, he looks at the young woman and he goes into a state of, let’s call it, wonder.   He has drawn hundreds, thousands, of faces before, but not this one, not at this angle, not in this light and not today.  He can’t say to himself, oh, yeah, another one of these, I’ve drawn plenty just like it, here’s how we do this.  Uh-uhh.  If he’s complacent, he’ll blow the whole thing.  Instead, he feels that this is an adventure, an exploration.  He has to feel the uncertainty that’s at the heart of an adventure.  Drawing is like walking a tight rope. The uncertainty heightens his concentration.  Instead of thinking of how it’s supposed to look when finished, he enters the drawing process itself.  He’s not performing for applause; he’s completely absorbed in the work process itself.  He’s working it out.  That means he puts down lines that trace his thought process.  In that process his perception shifts and his hand follows.  The result looks like scribbling.  But it’s precisely the scribbling that makes the drawing exiting to look at.  Because when we see those exploratory lines we are drawn into Leonardo’s mind and his concentration at that very moment.

That’s why a clean line drawing of his equestrian statue looks boring and lifeless.  But the sketch in which he worked out the movements and showed all the tracings of his thought process, this “messy” sketch is exiting to look at.  The clean line drawing (again, a tracing by me) has all the information, but that’s not why we look at drawings.  It’s not information we want, it’s the glimpse into another mind, another sensibility.  To get that glimpse, we have to be invited to enter into the drawing process itself.

A hard point to get across.  My students want to produce neat drawings.  When I encourage them to scribble and leave the scribbled lines without erasing, I know I’m opposing everything the culture and their past schooling value.  This is certainly true of returning, mature students.  It is even more true of students in their twenties.  Why?!   When a teacher encourages you to be “messy,” why  can’t you revel in that freedom?   One young art major recently enlightened me:  most of us, he said, started drawing by copying Manga.   We will talk about the crippling influence of  Manga in a future blog.

In my class, I recently drew a model while my students stood around me and looked over my shoulder.  I drew with a waxy crayon (China marker) that makes erasing impossible.  That’s the point. Don’t erase. Let your hand move lightly over the paper, tracing your thought process.  As your perception shifts, so does your line.  Change your mind and leave the first impression under your new “take.”  As you get more and more into the process, your line will become more sure of itself.  It will take off.  Seeing takes time and seems to occur in layers.  Draw for the adventure.   Draw for the pleasure of the process itself.

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The Ellipse is in your hand

You’ll find a two minute video on YouTube in which I demonstrate how to swing your hand in the air in an elliptical path.  When you do, the ellipse on paper will just follow.  I invite everyone to watch this short video, because it simulates a class room demo where you watch over the shoulder of the instructor. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLD9aCjoNWc

Here are the steps:

1. Place your forearm at about a 45 degree angle to your body and adjust the angle of your paper so that its vertical edge is parallel to your forearm.

2. Hold the pencil with fingers not curled in a writing grip, but slightly extended.  Let the pencil rest on your middle finger with your forefinger about an inch-and-a-half from the tip of the pencil.

3. Your hand is high over the paper. Only your pinky is resting lightly on the paper.

4. Gently swing your wrist in the air in an elliptical path.  Feel the pinky brushing over the paper and allow your forearm to move slightly. Find a speed and rhythm that’s comfortable and even.  Draw some ellipses in the air in a continuous movement.

5. Without interrupting the rhythm, lower the pencil to the paper. Then resume the ellipses in the air. Move the paper. After 3 or 4 ellipses in the air, lower the pencil to mark the paper without breaking the rhythm.

6. As you continue practicing, move the paper over and up.   Keep the position of the arm the same.

I love the paradox of this process.  The ellipse on paper–which is real and visible—is the residue of the ellipse in the air, which is an illusion.

I talked about the ellipse in an earlier blog, dated April 19.  I’m returning to the ellipse now because the New York Times has started a 12-week series on the art of drawing by James McMullan.  His second article, September 24, was on the ellipse.  Unfortunately, it is, at best, confusing.  Mr. McMullan offers no real guidance on how to approach the drawing process.  The comments left by readers show that they learned nothing from the article, though there was an abundant outpouring of enthusiasm over the fact that the Times is running a series on—what?—drawing !  I, too,  am delighted that the art of drawing has found space in a newspaper.  Here’s my own comment,  # 83, quoted in the Times:

“It’s wonderful to see that the Times is running a column on drawing. I agree with commentator #32 who laments the fact that most of us are visually illiterate. We should all be drawing! But Mr. McMullan is a poor choice as a teacher. After you’ve imagined the tops of glasses and bowls as so many floating Frisbees, you’re still no closer to learning how to actually move your hand to make an ellipse. I start every one of my new drawing classes with a demonstration of how the hand moves when drawing an ellipse. It’s a smooth, graceful gesture and it needs repeated practice over weeks and months. After students have watched over my shoulder to see the demo, I sit next to them and correct their movements. In my own blog about the art of drawing, https://artamaze.wordpress.com, I gave a lesson about drawing the ellipse (April 19, 2010), in which I used the analogy to the Frisbee– not as a shape because that’s useless–but as a reminder of how the wrist moves when you throw the Frisbee. That’s the real connection!
Mr. McMullan mentions that the hand needs to be loose in drawing the ellipse, but then he shows us ellipses drawn by a very stiff hand. His ellipses are not drawn with any swing at all, but with a scratchy, hesitant line. Mr. McMullan, you are most welcome to attend my drawing class. With empathetic, insightful instruction, you, too, can learn to swing your wrist to draw a lively ellipse.”

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