C l i v e P o w s e y/P a i n t i n g/D r a w i n g

This week we'll continue drawing with 'the box' in mind but using more challenging subject matter; a dolls house and also some automobile toys. As well, I hope we can also have a crack at drawing some cylinders in order to practice drawing elipses. In all of the drawings we will start with the idea of constructing them within simple 'boxes'; this will help you establish the perspective of what you are drawing and thus make it more accurate. Later in this class, and other classes, we will try to apply these box 'modules' to the human face and body.

It's not much of a leap from drawing boxes to drawing houses, as most architecture uses the box as it's primary design module. In class we'll project light on the dolls house in the same way as with the cardboard boxes so that if you have or want to take the time, you can do some shading on the drawing with crayon or with wash.

Above is a quick snap of the point of view of the dolls house from which I developed the drawing/sketch below.

Below are two stages of my drawing of the house. Notice how I imagined the whole house within a larger cube or box from which I 'chopped' and 'chiselled' the house. An alternative, way of constructing the drawing might be assembling the component cubes of the house and then carving them down, as with drawing the cars in the next exercise. For example, you draw the cube for base. You draw the cube for the main body of the house. You draw a cube to represent the overbearing roof. Then you chisel it down and add superstructure. If you have ever used the free 3D modelling program Google Sketch Up you will know that you construct your objects very similarly to the modular type of drawing that we are exploring.

Be aware that these very rough drawings with all their evidence of construction lines are just that: rough drawings. If you want to have a 'clean' drawing, for example to ink for a comic or to use as a base for a painting, you will need to redraw it using a light table. Commercial illustrators, fine artists, and animators used light tables to project light through the rough drawing so that it would appear through a clean sheet of paper upon which they would trace and redraw their rough cleanly and correctly. Nowadays, with tablets and computer programs that accomodate drawing, you can do your clean drawing on a layer on top of the rough. Then you can digitally paint on a layer on top of that, and flip layers as you wish. Digital or traditional, the process of cleaning a rough drawing is really the same.

But most artists find 'clean' or 'polished' drawings aesthetically less pleasing. Whether you rough your drawing out like I have done in my demostrations above with swarms of linework and modular construction cubes, or just try and wing it with a clean line, a steady hand and eye, you'll usually make errors and mistakes that require adjusting. In making these errors you create 'searching lines' which are very very appealing to lovers of classical drawing methods. So, the rough drawing for a comic book panel might have more appeal to someone who draws than the clean, slick, inked up image.

For comparison purposes, heres the dolls house roughly rendered in SketchUp. Because the dolls house is small and the classroom large, some of you might find it easier to draw the house from a projected image than from the actual dolls house.

Perhaps you don't like drawing cars or boxes. Just give them a try this once, because you should be able to learn some interesting things about the drawing process by drawing cars that you can apply to all of your drawing. People who love drawing all have their favourite subjects. But mainly they love drawing. They love the challenge and the tactile enjoyment of drawing just about anything. Try to love drawing itself first, regardless of subject.

Coincidentally and of value to us, engineers and car designers apparently describe vehicles as 'one box', 'two box' and 'three box' designs. Below I've sketched some examples of each, and it should be self evident which is which.

It's not without a degree of amusement that I'm going to be continually asking you to work within the box! Down below you can see why it can be so helpful. Working within the box is similar to the way an actual sculptor or a 3d computer sculptor/animator /designer works to create an object. You start with a block, a box shape of your material and then chisel away the major 'planes' gradually making them smaller, finer more subtle, reductively defining the object until you are finally whittling fine detail and ultimately sanding and 'polishing' it. You'll notice in the drawings below that I'm struggling with proportions all the way through the effort; in a couple of cases adjusting the 'box' size after the initial rough outline. Drawing cars can be very instructive in the same way drawing a human face or head can be. Most vehicles follow the same basic design concepts (that is, very few designers venture outside the box) and yet all vehicle brands and models are subtly different, just like individual faces. Incredibly subtle. It takes a great deal of observation, care and practice to be able to make a drawing of a vehicle identifiable as as particular model.

Drawing is a skill that can be applied to many occupations. Good drawing skills can be a valuable tool for architects and engineers, for example. Below are some of the drawings that the billiant Greek/British engineer Sir Alec Issigonis made for the original Mini car. It was a revolutionary design; Issigonis played with modules trying to visualize how he could get a large passenger compartment on a tiny wheelbase using a simple two-box construction. He put the engine sideways, making it a 'transverse' engine. This design, as well as the sloping back/hatch, unibody construction, is the way all modern small cars and even larger vehicles are laid out. The mini, first introduced in 1958, was a brilliant and revolutionary auto design, and I have heard that Sir Alec originally sketched the design out after a 'Eureka!' moment on a paper napkin. Our family car in the 1960's; a mum, dad and three kids, was a little red mini which would actually be loaded up and taken on holidays for a week or two. It was an incredibly efficient design, and the hatchback vehicle that I currently drive is pretty well the same basic functional design.

Above is a 3/4 view comparison between Sir Alec's drawing and a photograph of a mini. Below is a poster for the marvellous movie The Italian Job with Micheal Cain and Noel Coward in which gold robbers use the mini's great drivability (it excelled at rally racing) to attempt a heist. You can see a (longish) clip of the chase scene after the heist HERE.

Finally, here is one more of Sir Alec Issigonis's drawings, for another vehicle. See how he has been able to utilize the 'see through' quality of linework to visualize interior components and their relationships with each other. I noticed many of you doing this with your cardboard box drawings, and you can easily option this same 'see through' sort of viewing when using Google SketchUp.

Before dealing with our next exercise, lets continue with this metaphore between drawing and sculpture; the idea of working within the box as sculptors must do, but move momentarily to the figure. Below left is a photograph of an unfinished Michelangelo sculpture of Atlas. The lack of finish in sculpture is often noted as having it's own special aesthetic appeal, in much the same way as we've noted in a rough or unfinished drawing. The lack of finish also provides insight into the artist's concieving his subject matter. You can see clearly he has liberated the figure from box-like masses, starting with an initial box of stone. I've tried to imitate the process on the left in a sketch below right. It's not an unsatisfactory way of developing a figure.

Later on we will devote an exercise strictly to the human head, drawing from a 'planar' bust, so lets momentarily jump a-head and look at this series of sequencial stages in the drawing, below, to see how, when we start drawing from within a box, the gradual chiselling and refining of the planes of the form can resemble the tactile chiselling made by a sculptor.

A general note on the previous and forthcoming exercises: When I'm out drawing, I don't usually draw in the 'style' and with the method that I'm doing now. This is drawing as an exercise, and also an effort to create something fairly structurally accurate and solid. I might draw like this on occasion. But whether or not I do, my regular drawing is always informed by what I have learned from doing these exercises that we've covered and the exercises that we will be doing in future classes.

Style and method are distinct attributes to a drawing, and your own style of drawing, your handwriting so-to-speak, will be quite different from mine. I'm not going to be trying, deliberately, to change your own unique handwriting with the drawing implement. This is something that you want to keep for yourself. My drawings here are quite heavy and often involve a 'swarm' of lines from which form emerges. I like the idea of form emerging from a swarm of sketchy lines, and I recommend that you try drawing like that, but it might not be for you as a result of your own personal drawing style. Your personal style might, for example be less sketchy, more considered and succinct.

But I will be trying to encourage you to work according to, and keep in mind, the method and concepts behind these exercises, for example, working within the box. Working within the box is going to be just one of a number of ways of seeing form that we are going to consider. In future all of them might be useful for your drawing development and practice on occasion. Sometimes, in a given drawing, you might find yourself recalling and implementing a bit of one classroom exercise and a bit of another.

When you are drawing in future and you recollect some of these drawing exercises and the concepts associated with them it might be like trying out various pairs of spectacles to view your subject matter.

Light Revealing Form

Line drawing is very different from shaded or rendered drawing. Lines are transparent and we can 'see through' them to the other side. As soon as we turn on the light (and shade) we create a sense of surface that is less penetrable. Much of our drawing will be using line only, but we will spend time, possibly later in our first class, doing some shading, and so a quick look at at how light plays on form might be in order.

Once we have constructed our first drawing with line, we're going to do some simple shading on it. Here's a metaphor to help with the idea of light playing over form.

Lets imagine we are in a very very dimly lit room. We have a sheet of black paper in front of us. Here's the sheet of black paper below us on a table which looks like this...

We take the sheet of black paper, and we scrunch it up into a ball, creasing it mightily, and then we more or less flatten it out again. Of course, we can't make it flat. We can't see it very well, but feeling it in the dim room, we can tell that it now has relief, it has creases, parts coming towards us, parts receding, parts facing one way, parts facing the other and everything in between. If we could see it clearly, it might actually look like topography, a mountainous landscape viewed from high above. But, as you can see below, the room is dimly lit and we can hardly see a thing...

We need a way of revealing, or imaging the topography, the relief, of the paper to make it visible. Lets imagine we have a can of white spray paint. We take it and spray it, left to right, at a low angle almost parallel to the bumpy surface of the paper. We spray and spray and the surface is revealed, even in the dim light of the room we are in...

Any plane, or fascet of the topography that catches the spraypaint more directly catches more paint and is therefore lighter. Planes that catch the light, ooops, I mean spraypaint, less directly receive less of it and are therefore darker. Planes completely hidden from the spray of paint, in the shadow of extreme relief, in the lee of the mountains, so to speak, receive no light...I mean paint... at all and are left pure black. If that spraypaint were photons of light it would be behaving in very much the same way as light itself striking form.

Here, below, is a similar effect of light and shade, not on a topography of crumpled paper, but on a topography of part of the human figure.

And here, below, is a description of light and shade on the topography created by an arrangement of boxes similar to what we will be working from. In this case I've used a series of washes to describe the light and shade on form. We will be using shading, but the idea is the same. You can see how, particularly using washes, a strong sense of light and shade is created.

Shading: The Value Scale and cross hatching

This is a drawing course, and in it we have the luxury of avoiding colour, particularly the local colour of an object we're drawing. You'll notice that many of our subjects for drawing lack colour, are made of plaster, or have been painted white. This is so that we can observe the form without the distraction of colour. When it comes to shading and describing light and shade on form, it is all the more useful to not have colour to deal with. The reason is is that colour, in black and white, translates into value and disrupts our observations of light and shade on form. It takes an experienced eye to be able to discrimate between light and shade on form and local colour and value. To be able to do so you need to be able to imagine what you are drawing, or painting, as though it is made of plaster and recognise where the light is strike and where it isn't.

(If you would like to see a visual break down that attempts to show the difference between local colour and the effect of light and shade, visit the posts for one of my painting classes on the instruction page links and look for the fruit arrangement.)

But for the time being, we don't have to worry about colour because I'm avoiding it in our subject matter. When we shade, we won't be shading values that represent local colour, only various degrees of shade, from pure white to black. Below you can see a value scale of six degrees of shading between light and dark. You could throw in a couple of more degrees, but there is a limit to the degree of subtlety that is useful.

Composition: Drawing on Phi, The Golden Ratio

We shouldn't breeze through our basic drawing course without some consideration of composition. Composition in a two dimensional piece of visual art is the conscious and unconscious assembly of many visual elements into a overall design. I'm not an expert on composition, and also want to avoid spending a lot of time researching material that could, in fact, be the subject of an extensive course of it's own.

Composition usually has a very occult, subliminal, effect on us when looking at images, because we are consciously giving our attention to the subject, the object or the narrative. That is, the more obvious visual elements. To keep things simple, we're just going to deal with the basic idea of placement of the subject or objects that you might find yourself drawing within the picture frame and how those objects might divide up the two dimensional space of your picture plane within the picture frame. If you are going to draw a subject, why not try and place it within the frame of reference in a way that is most interesting, 'pleasing to the eye', or 'eyecatching'.

At some point in our classes we are going to take a moment to view some film sequences. I've decided that fooking at a bit of film footage is a great brief and informal way to study composition. You can also study painting composition, and this study is very eye opening, however in more traditional formal paintings compostion is an extremely complex creation. Studying it, for me anyway, is just a little overwhelming; too much information. I'm guessing that part of the reason for this is that a traditional painting was designed to be looked at for a long period of time. It was designed to lead your eye, through compostion, around the framed image in a long and entertaining voyage, satisfying the eye all the way. Film is different in that it is moving and has the dimension of time engineered into it. The voyage of the eye in film is a brief moment on and in an image and then on to the next scene. A scene is usually only a few seconds long and then, through cunning narrative, storyboard composition and editing, your eye/your focus; the node of consciousness that exists for you within the film itself, is shifted effortlessly to the next step of the unfolding story. The brief time span allowed the eye in a film scene, I think, makes it essential that composition is 'punchy'; powerful, engaging and, importantly...simple. Everything in a film or television scene has been carefully placed to create an effect that suits our innate sense of design. Over and over again, perhaps in more than 95% of scenes, film directors and storyboard drawing artists use something known as the Golden Ratio (or Golden Mean). Not always; occasionally there is an obvious compositional dissonance, or symmetry, but this is usually the exception and done for a distinct reason. Rather than study composition in a formal and possibly boring context, I'm going to quickly cover it by showing you where the Golden Ratio lies on our screen and then project a few film clips. You can see for yourself how extensively this compositional device is used and how easy it will be to employ.

Here is a basic explanation of The Golden Ratio: Two quantities are in the Golden Ratio when the ratio of the sum of the quantities, a + b, and the larger of the two quantities (a in the example below) are equal to the ratio of the smaller quantity (b) and the larger quantity (a). To make a long story short, if you took the length of your sheet of paper in a 'landscape' format and drew a vertical line on one side or the other at approximately the 0.6180339887 mark..., lets say about the 0.62 mark, you would have divided your length at a 'sweet spot' that is used over and over in the compositional division of space in the long tradition of art and the somewhat shorter tradition of filmaking.

(Wikipedia Graphic)

I should also point out that I'm not an expert on composition, or the golden ratio. In regard to composition and the golden ratio I have simply observed it, or have had it pointed out to me. Occasionally I consciously try to incorporate it into my drawing or painting. More often or not I unconsciously incorporate it. When I watch The National news at night, I see the golden ratio in the placement of talking heads on the screen. You don't have to be aware of the Golden Ratio to put it to use; most of us, most of the time, will naturally tend to compose and arrange objects such that they divide space close to the ratio. Read more about it at Wikipedia, here.

There's a bit of a whackier cultish site devoted to phi here.

And on this site, here's the page on art here.

Below are some small file screengrabs from Wim Wender's 'Wings of Desire', a movie from the '80's. As a quick background to what you're seeing, the film is shot in Berlin, and it's about an angel who becomes mortal. It is shot in black and white when seen in the point of view of the angels who apparently don't see in colour. The mortals life is briefer, but in colour. Mortals don't see angels (although children and people close to death seem to get glimpses of them during the film). But the angels see the mortals they console and each other. I like the way the angels position themselves around the mortals. I found the film's 'library' sequence on YouTube and went through it snapping some screen grabs. The clusters of mortals and angels in this sequence divide space in a way that has been very carefully considered. Now, the Golden Ratio isn't necessarily in every shot; filmmakers mix things up a bit. Sometimes there's symmetry, sometimes discordant unbalanced composition might be used to best effect. However, when the moving camera pauses, if you look below I think you'll consistently notice the Golden Ratio in the division of space by the central figures. The ratio's dividing line often lines up with the eye, the side of the head, the horizontal axis of a standing figure, or a vector of movement by a figure. Or a significant background element.

To view the full library sequence from 'Wings of Desire' click here.

Place a finger on your computer screen, if you wish, at the point on the line where 'a' meets 'b' and scroll down to see where it lines up on the screengrabs. Then put your finger at the point where 'b' meets 'a' when b and a are 'flipped' (screengrab two) and again, scroll down.

from Wikipedia

From the film 'Wings of Desire'

There is a a bit of a happy accident in choosing the above film sequence for observing the lines that intersect the image corresponding with the golden ratio. Firstly, the library itself is riddled with vertical and horizontal axis's found in the 'modern' architecture as well as the stacks on which the books sit. Also, when we as viewers are looking for the Golden Ratio in this sequence the characters at times almost seem to be looking at it, pointing to it with a pen, contemplating it, and touching it.

So, what does all this have to do with drawing in general or life drawing? All these images above are arrangements of objects, or figures on the picture plane within the picture frame. The figures divide space. When you are drawing your subject you are dividing space within the frame of your sheet of paper. Although we are concentrating most of our efforts in drawing to describe form convincingly, a small amount of initial effort might go into arranging your subject within the paper's edges. As you start drawing think or feel where you would like the subject to be. This is worth considering at the sweeping gesture stage of your initial drawing. Divide the space of the page up with long sweeps that suggest the dynamic vectors in the subject. Perhaps indicate roughly where the Golden Ratio lays on page. By working right out to the edge of your page you will divide space more expansively. Take a brief moment to think about composition before you start drawing.

Below are some storyboard-style panels with a grid representing The Golden Ratio on it and some of the kinds of arrangements of a character or action that you might find in film and television. I sketched these from a wonderful television that you can view HERE. Watch the spot carefully and you will notice that it is laced with The Golden Ratio; not just in the placement of characters, or vertical and horizontal structures in the background, but in the vectors of moving characters and falling objects...