More About Drawing
In December’s newsletter I wrote that “drawing is the root skill.” The sad truth is that if my drawing is off, no one even looks to see how well I painted the eye, mouth, or any other detail. BTW what most people mean by “drawing” boils down to proportion – having the right parts in the right place.
At the American Academy of Art in Chicago, I had the great fortune to study life drawing with the legendary Bill Parks who trained many of today’s professional artists. He taught two drawing methods: contour and gesture.
Contour is a concise description of the subject. Mr. Parks often said that a line goes “a certain distance before it changes direction” – length and angle. He said that contour drawing is “like brain surgery.”
Gesture, on the other hand, is about movement and action. He used to describe it as a “scribble, but it’s a meaningful scribble. It has mass and direction and, most importantly, it’s doing something!”
Contour drawing involves careful measurement. We lay out the features by comparing two relationships at a time. The first measurement on a head was “distance from top of head to the inner corner of the eye (along the center line), compared to the distance from the corner of the eye to the bottom of the chin.” We make marks on our drawing paper to indicate the same proportions. The artist continues dividing the space to find ever-smaller relationships. It’s a systematic method for accurate drawing. The key is to measure…don’t guess! Mr. Parks also admonished us to “see how square you can make the round”. In other words, draw with straight lines, not curves. It makes the drawings more powerful and more accurate! Here are a couple of examples of contour drawings.
You can go to my YouTube channel to see these as time lapse videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW0r7A51_H0&t=12s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiz6Wd6DgP8 (Please “like” and subscribe.)
Bill Parks method for gesture drawing is to “start at the top of the pose and go straight to the bottom. Next find a center point and then work a little on one side and then the other. Always looking; always comparing.” I bet I heard those words a thousand times during the eight years I studied with him. As the artist’s gaze moves around the figure, the charcoal follows, scribbling the mass and action of the pose.
After laying out the gesture of the pose, we were taught to come back and put the contour drawing on top of it. Then, if we had time, we’d draw the contour of the edge of shadow pattern. We could shade the shadow pattern when the model took a break. Using this compound method one can capture a fairly accurate representation of a figure in a few minutes. This method yields a lively drawing that is anything but stiff! Here are a couple of examples of 5 minute drawings.
