Developing the Drawing: One-Two

The assignment here was to do two drawings from the same subject.  In the first drawing you work to get everything right; you study the shapes, the anatomy.  After you’ve worked up a good sweat over all these details, you exhale and tape a fresh piece of paper on your drawing board.  Now you do the second drawing.  You’ve worked out the hard parts and are thoroughly familiar with what makes this subject interesting to you.  Now you relax and draw for the sheer pleasure of drawing.  You let loose.  Your pencil skates across the paper.  Not that you’re glib or shallow.  On the contrary, you now draw the whole subject.  All at once.  You’re not bogged down by any details.  Been there, done that.  This second drawing will go fast, much faster than the first.  But, paradoxically, even though it does not work out details, your second drawing—the developed drawing–will suggest depth.  The viewer is pulled in and sees more than you spelled out.

This drawing by Maggy Shell is the second stage, the developed drawing, done from a magazine cover. We get this kind of image in the mail all the time and tend to toss it away as junk mail.  Take another look.  Your waste paper basket offers a wealth of inspiring subject matter.

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

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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

http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com

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