Imagine doing this drawing below. See how lightly the ovoids are drawn so as not to take away from the finished drawing. Sometimes just pretending to draw can improve our skills.
Copying drawings is a way to learn to draw as well. When I moved to Paris in the mid-80's, after a year of studying art in Florence, Italy, I would sit in the salons of the Jeu de Paume and draw from impressionist paintings. The rooms were small and the benches were comfortable. I was never disturbed by anyone visiting the museum. It gave me confidence after having spent so much time looking at works done by the Masters. The works I drew from then are now housed in the Museé D'Orsay in larger rooms filled with massive numbers of people from all over the world pouring through. It was difficult to even get a good view of the works I'd known so intimately when I was last back in 2012. That said, there were always works of art that nobody was looking at and areas of D'Orsay where nobody seemed to venture through and I was able to enjoy some solitary drawing time with new works.
This organic ovoid drawing exercise begins with an idea taken from Drawing the Human Form by William Berry (see Fig 3-65) ... that the human form can be drawn using a series of organic ovoid shapes. The exercise shows a more hard-edged method. I've been asking you to draw using a half stick of conte on it's sides after it has been worn down on a blank sheet of paper so that it leaves soft cloud-like forms on our paper as we drive it around the page in an effort to replicate the pose and human forms on our model. We talked about using a concept in drawing called drawing large to small (L2S). It is important we see the large picture first so we can center the pose and fit smaller forms into larger ones.
We begin by intuitively finding the center of the pose using our L-Frames (using our thumbs and index fingers to create a frame of reference that is about a 3:4 ratio which echoes the 18 x 24 newsprint frame of reference). It is a good idea to place a light dot where you believe the center of your page is.
We continue sighting the pose through our L-frames to get an idea how the pose will fit on the picture plane and hold in our memory what is in each quadrant as we are drawing. Then by dragging our conte along the page, we locate lines of action. Once the lines of action are found, we can then place forms where we feel they belong on these lines of action. We will work large to small (see below) to place large groups of forms on the action lines. It means we quickly and intuitively designate size and placement on the page and can immediately see if we are drawing too large or too small on the page. When we draw very lightly we are using another concept called drawing light to dark (L2D) and it is easy to erase mistakes if they are light. We do this rather than creating heavier lines in an effort to fix an error. Correcting mistakes with heavier lines means that attention is brought to the area where the errors are.
In the following order:
Start by very lightly drawing the torso where you think it should be on the page based on these previous spacial observations. The torso consists of both the chest and pelvis (sometimes referred to as the bean because of the shape) and can be drawn very lightly as a series of continuously connected organic ovoids. Once we feel we have correctly drawn the torso - we don't want to draw too dark and overwork the drawing - we will move our conte down to the thighs and continue drawing overlapping organic ovoid shapes that relate to what we are seeing attaching the thighs to the hips and drawing down into the knees. We then move up through the figure to the neck and head and using the same rounded organic ovoid forms we will sink the neck into the upper torso. We next move to the upper arms and find the forms drawing down to the elbows and then we head down to the calves paying attention to the negative spaces between the legs and feet and using them to help us location their position on the page. Finally, we finish by drawing the forearms and hands.
No comments:
Post a Comment