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DRAWING FROM LIFE
This introduction leads on to adjoining pages of notes
which concentrate on Drawing and Painting from life
with coloured pencils
There are a host of ways of seeing an image and recording it so that it can be used for an artwork. Photographs can be taken and used as a basis.
References can be researched and elements taken from several images to make one picture.
However we gather the information,
at the end of the day the image needs to be drawn out on the working surface and
there are doubts cast in the mind of the aspiring artist whether it is ‘proper’ to
‘cheat’ and use one of many copying systems -
Professional artists ( and famous ones at that ) have ‘cheated’ for centuries as a way of speeding up the process of getting a picture completed and paid for.
As a Coloured Pencil artist you will have the further obstacle in the amount of time
a CP picture will take to complete.
The ‘Art Police’ will not be calling round with an arrest warrant, I can assure you, if you use a quick way the establish your outlines and get your picture in perspective and correctly proportioned
HOWEVER
Drawing from life -
gives you the confidence to grow in art terms
and your art will benefit from your improved ‘eye’ and compositional skills.
I had started to draft a page on this topic
when I came across a thread on the Scribbletalk website.
The writer of the item below is Rebeca Calvo, A New York based professional designer,
and she says it so much better than I can .....
Rebeca Calvo has a website of her artwork
You can see it at :
Rebeca Calvo writes ....
We all feel more comfortable with one way of working or another, and surely we all
"see" different to the reality "out there". So we have to experiment and find our
own way.
There is one sure thing: you can perfectly "cheat", it is ok.
Artists (I mean, people out there with a good income from their art) do "cheat".
By cheating I mean that it's ok if you use computer, transferring a photo into paper
and whatever method available to you in order to start a drawing or a painting, because
sometimes you may not want to spend a long time getting the right proportions, so
you "cheat", and then spend your time doing the colour, the composition and so on.
However,
even if you decide to do as above, you need to constantly draw from still life.
I think it's the best way to train our eyes and brain to draw, to see proportions, shadows, lines and composition. I think is like basic running and stretching for artists.
It does not matter if you end up trashing all those still life drawings. The point is to keep training your brain to distinguish shapes, shadows, lines and transfer them into paper.
I find myself going "blind" when I don't sketch from real life for a while.
There
are many exercises that help us keep our brain "trained to see as an artist".
I think it is best to simply use your pencil (or whatever you are drawing with), paper and your hands.
Here are some I did in the past and have found helpful:
1/ Exercises to learn proportion
and shapes:
Starting by noting on the paper some main points.
Then continue to trace the lines: where are the verticals, the horizontals, the diagonals...
notice that the vase in the back is right above the handle of the basket at the front
and so on.
This will help us train ourselves in distinguishing the shapes and doing
it in proportion.
It is very helpful to focus on the negative spaces instead of the positive ones.
Forget what you are drawing, just think of lines and space.
Never think "this is a hand", "this is an apple"
(every time I do that, I end up drawing the hands and apples I did when I was 5!).
Once
in a while it helps to cover part of our drawing, just leave one window open, so
that you don't see a whole object, but you can concentrate on lines, just lines.
It's
also very important to draw it all. Not just one figure. Draw everything out there
in front of you.
It's hard (at least for me) but it helps our brain about the relationships of objects
and spaces.
And for these exercises it's also important to do only lines. DO NOT SHADOW
IT.
In this way we practice to get shapes, lines and proportions right, without the help
of shadowing or colouring.
Do many of these exercises. And also do them over different
time periods:
Do some in just 10 minutes, 30 minutes for others, 1 hour and so on.
This may sound
stupid for some, but it was a block to me (and I guess other people out there):
you can erase! Yes, use your eraser all the time. Correct yourself all the time.
2/
Practice shadows:
draw a still life composition using only black, white and grey:
3 tones only.
Best is to practice with charcoal, or something like that. Start by making your paper grey colour. Then you have to look at the scene, and decide what is going to be black, what is going to be white, and what stays grey. Remember: only 3 tones.
Start doing the black parts, then the white ones (you do the whites with your eraser).
And then, on a different drawing, start doing the white parts, then the black ones.
Depending on the person, some find it harder to draw first black, then white, others
vice-
Because these drawings have
only 3 tones, make them in intervals of 10-
After you have done many of these, move on to make drawings in 5 tones.
Again, you start by filling the paper of the middle grey tone, and then move to draw
the darker grey and blacks, and the lighter grey and whites etc.
These I do in sets
of 30 to 60 minutes per drawing.
Start
drawing in a square or rectangle that is only like 60-
Then you take the next
10-
I always thought that if you take a "window"
and look through it, is like deciding my composition and that was it. But I have
noticed that things do change once you put them on paper.
You can have a scene in front of you, but the best composition you can use to look
at it, or to take a photograph or to make a drawing, is actually different (a composition
that works great on a photo, may work just fine on a drawing, and vice-
© RBKC 22 March 2010
To practice drawing is to train the eye to see a three dimensional object and translate the image into two dimensions and finish with an object on paper which is believable.
Portraits may well need measurement to get the features ‘just so’ and reflect the
actual likeness of the sitter, but to have sketched out a series of quick images
of the face will have concentrated the artistic eye and brain on to what is required
to show the unique features of the sitter -
Rebeca has some excellent ideas in her item which I hope you find useful
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