Bird in Hand Arts

We met on Thursday January 28th at my house.  The topic for today was proportions of the human face, viewed from the front, in profile, and in three-quarter orientation.

We measured the distance between our eyes and chin, between our eyes and the top of the head.  We measured the distance from the inside corner of the eye to the chin and found it to be equivalent to the measurement between the outside edge of the eye and the back of the ear.  We discussed the location of the mouth and nose in the face and the relationships between the eyes and the mouth.  We talked about why beginning drawing students are so likely to get the eyes too high in the face and the back of the head too small.

Our class work consisted of copying a master drawing of a profile portrait:  John Singer Sargeant ’s sketch of Madame Pierre Gautreau.  Here is the original which we were to copy:

John Singer Sargeant's portrait of Madame Gautreau

Notice that one of us has added grid lines to the original to aid in the reproduction of the sketch.

Here’s how we did:

Danila's copy

Charles's copy

Bonnie's copy

Today’s lesson was on value, contrast, light and shadow.  We started out discussing the types of light and shadow that an artist might encounter in trying to represent an object naturalistically.  We distinguished between cast shadows, the darkest kind of shadow in a drawing, and crest shadows, which occur on the side of an object where light is not directly shining.  We contrasted highlights, the lightest lights in a drawing and reflected lights, places on an object which are lit indirectly. 

Then we set about drawing eggs.  Everyone had two eggs, which were lit both from above by a chandelier and ambiantly from a large window behind the table where we sat together.

Today’s lesson was on perspective and proportion, difficult topics to teach and to learn.

My sketch of a corridor with African iron piece hanging under sconce.

We started the class  standing near the doors to our deck,  looking at Mount Baker in the distance.   With one eye closed and our pencils held in front of us with our elbows locked, we took measurements of the height of the mountain relative to its width at the base.  We then measured the the height of Mount Baker relative to the heights of its various foothills, as well the width of its base relative to the width of the hills in the foreground.

Charles's sketch

The subject of the class was not Mount Baker however, but doorways and corridors.  Mount Baker was just an illustration of proportionality.

We each picked a doorway and set down to draw it.  As Betty Edwards suggests in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, we each started by measuring the width of the top of the door and using that as our “basic unit,” against which all other measures were taken.   After an hour we had a look at each other’s sketches.  Everyone had nailed this aspect of drawing.

Vanishing points were problematic for several of us, but  Robblie had worked out a way to find them  accurately which she passed on to the group.  She suggested  that if we drew lines outward from the tops and bottoms of  our doors and extended them to where they intersected each other and the eye-level represented in the drawing (the horizon), we’d have located thevanishing point, which lay outside of our format lines.  We could then use the lines extending from the tops and bottoms of our doors to the vanishing point as references for drawing other parts of the picture, e.g. panels in the door, pictures on the wall adjacent to the door, indeed any line representing the horizontal plane of the picture seen in perspective.

Here’s Robbie’s sketch with the vanishing point represented.  She was sitting about mid-way up a flight of stairs when she drew this:

Robbie's Sketch

And here’s Danila’s sketch before and after Robbie’s helpful suggestions:

Danila's "before" sketch

Charles’s original sketch (shown above) was very small.  And since he had crowded it onto a page with another drawing, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to reproduce it here, so I asked him if he’d consider redrawing it.   He didn’t want to, being one of those people who doesn’t like to do the same thing twice, so he opted for drawing the glass door out to the deck where we had stood that morning to measure the proportions of Mount Baker.

By this time, night had fallen and it was dark outside, so Charles ended up drawing  a table and a planter in front of the door and reflections on the door of the room behind him and off to his right.  It is a beautiful and complicated piece of work, which I have included here, even though it was not part of the class.

Reflections in a glass door

Our third class meeting started off with us sharing the results of a homework assignment:  everyone was to have drawn two pictures using the picture planes and viewfinders:  the first was a representation of the non-dominant hand holding an object; the second, a flower.    All of the pieces showed amazing control and everyone was pleased.  Here are  four of the hand sketches (Danila was unable to make the class).

Alan did this very nice drawing of a Chippendale chair

The work for the day was to copy a picture of a Chippendale chair from a photograph.  The point of this exercise was to foreground the concept of ” negative space,” getting artists to attend to shapes that share contours with the figures they are drawing—in this case, the shapes created around the fretwork on the back of the chair, as well as the spaces under and around its legs and the spaces between the respresentation of the chair and the format lines of the composition.

In The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards selects a shape to get you started and gives instruction on how to proceed from there.  You’re using the crosshairs on your picture plane and on your drawing pad to get the scale and proportions of the chair, but, still, copying the fretwork on the Chippendale  is no mean feat.  Examining the negative spaces carefully is crucial to getting the lines right.  We all found ourselves struggling to keep this in mind.

Alan and Robbie got their drawings right;  Charles and I got the vertical dimensions of the chair correct, but erred on the horizontal ones. Not egregiously so, but our chairs were nevertheless a little too “fat”  compared to the chair on the picture plane.  The fact is we only noticed the discrepancy when we put our drawings under the plexiglass sheet onto which we’d copied the photo of the chair.  Our drawings looked very much like Chippendale chairs, only not that particular one.

Everyone “got it.”  A representational drawing must  include not just a figure, but a ground.  The ground has shape and its shape contributes to our correct perception of the figure.   To draw a tree, you have to not just the trunk and the leaves, but the spaces between the leaves and around the trunk.  You have to draw the negative spaces because they share contours with whatever figure you are attempting to draw.

We got back together on Thursday, December 17, for our second lesson.  I pulled out Betty Edwards’ style view finders and drawing planes that Charles and I had spent the morning assembling.   I explained that we were going to use these devices to make  drawings of our non-dominant hands in foreshortened perspective.    I talked a little about what foreshortening was and tried to explain the concept of negative space.  Then we picked up our tools and went to work.

No one except me had used a picture plane before, so none of the others knew what to expect.  They dutifully balanced the planes and viewfinders on one hand, closed an eye, picked up a dry marker and set to work, “copying” the image that they saw of their hands onto the sheets of plexiglass that constituted their picture planes.  They were literally astonished when they set their picture planes with the image of the hand they had drawn down on a sheet of white paper.  Each and every one of them saw  a beautifully drawn image of a fairly complex object.  Everyone was very pleased.

Alan wanted to know why he had to keep one eye closed, so we talked a bit about binocular disparity and how it affects drawing, especially when you are trying to draw something close-up.   We talked about how keeping one eye closed “flattens” the object you are trying to draw, so that it is easier to transfer it to a two dimensional surface….a canvas, a drawing pad, a piece of paper.

We then attempted to transfer the image from our picture planes to our drawing pads.  We toned our paper, traced a format line from our view finders and drew in a simple horizontal and vertical crosshairs, matching the one on the picture plane.  We then  located the points where the lines we had drawn on the picture plane interected with the format and crosshair lines on the plane and copied them to our drawing papers.  Next we used the planes to reposition our hands as we had drawn them and we then set the planes aside.  From here on in, we were drawing.  Not copying.  Drawing from an object in nature.

The room fell completely silent. Everyone concertrated on his or her drawing for a good forty minutes.  When we were finished, we showed each other the results, which were very impressive.  Two drawing lessons and we can do stuff like this!  Wow!

Here is Robbie’s drawing of her hand:

Hand

Since everyone was pleased (and surprised) with the realism of their drawings, we talked about what we had just done and what it meant.  I tried to make the case that although the picture planes and view finders felt a little “gimmicky,” they were only devises for training us “how to look”  at the world.  We won’t be using them much longer.

The whole point of this exercise is to give people the confidence that they can draw realistically or representationally….that drawing is a skill that improves with practice.  It is not some mysterious ”gift” or  “talent.”

I gave a homework assignment and let the others go.  Alan returned hours later with a kit he had put together to carry on his impending travels.  It included a picture plane and view finder, a sketch pad, pencils, erasers, a paint brush, a shapener….the whole magilla.

I’m so thrilled at his enthusiasm.  He has to drop out of the drawing class (having been its impetus) after the next lesson, because he’s going to Spain and France and Italy.   But he’s looking forward  to trying out his new found drawing skills in Europe.  I lent him Sara Midda’s book The South Of France, A Sketchbook, as a sorce of inspiration.

Here are a couple more hand drawings:

Hand with spoon (Bonnie)

Hand with Key (Charles)

One of my friends, upon reading through my travel journal from France commented wistfully that he wished he could draw like me, so that he could create the sort of  personalized records of his trips that I make of mine.   I offered to teach him to draw or at least get him started drawing, so that he’d have the confidence to do some creative work on his own during his annual “winter escape” from the rainy Northwest.

He accepted…and the drawing class was born.

I asked a couple of other people if they’d like to join Alan and me in a drawing class and three others signed on:  Charles, Danila and Robbie.  Two more friends expressed interest, but couldn’t come at the time I proposed, so we started out today with four budding artists.

I’ve taught drawing to adults before, once in New Bern, North Carolina, at a store/gallery  called Carolina Arts, and several times in Oriental, North Carolina, where my husband and I owned an art gallery.  I’ve had pretty good success with Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain curriculum (now The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain), so that’s where we started this time.

I asked the members of group to come with a pre-instruction self portrait, a drawing of their non-dominant hand and a sketch of someone made from memory.  I have to confess, though, that I didn’t give them a great deal of forewarning, so not everyone had all three sketches.   My bad.  All it really means however is that they won’t have those early drawings to look back on and see their progress.

Here’s what we did on the first day:  I talked some about Edwards’ folk theory of Left and Right brain activity.  Edwards tries to make the case that the left side of our brains processes analytic and verbal stimuli, while the right side is non-verbal, synthetic, artistic and relational.    I said I thought the left/right dichotomy was an attractive set of metaphors, but that it was quite a stretch to generalize from the behaviors of people with severe head injuries to the artistic capacities of normal people.

Be that as it may, I went on to credit Edwards with developing some really great exercises for training people “how to see” in preparation for teaching them “how to draw.”  We did three of her exercises.

(1)  The faces/vases diagram.

(2)  Picasso’s sketch of Stravinsky.

(3)  Pure contour drawing.

I did all the exercises along with everyone else, just to observe how I reacted to them after having done them so many times before.  I was interested to observe that I didn’t  re-experience the conflict that the Faces/Vases diagram previously engender in me.  In fact, I could no longer see either the faces or the vases once I put pencil to paper and started drawing.  The diagram was just a follow-the-pure-line exercise for me now.  This I see as a good thing;  it means I fall into Edwards calls “R-mode” almost immediately when I start to draw simple things.

The others expressed conflict though.  They all found it frustrating to try to produce a line that was the reverse of something they’d labelled  “forehead” or “nose” or “lips,” viz. a line that zigged when it “should have” zagged.    They start the line going to the left and then realize they had to go to the right and they stop, erase and start again.  This is the brilliance of Betty Edwards method:  she knows how to illustrate problems so that they become discovery procedures.

I’ve also done the upside down Picasso drawing so many times now that it was relatively simple for me.  I knew where the problems lay and I compensated for them in advance by drawing a simple grid over Picasso’s sketch.  This allowed me to make four simple drawing, rather than one complex one, and it better allowed me to exploit relational (or “right mode” )thinking, rather than struggling with verbally-dominated thought.  Rat that I am, I didn’t tell the others that they could do this as well.

Accordingly they had some difficulty getting in all the lines from Picasso’s sketch,  but it was nothing like the conflict they felt with Faces/Vases.    They all did pretty credible reproductions, even if their proportions got out of whack here and there.

Charles had a few problems with this exercise.  He started at the top of the Picasso’s sketch (which was the bottom of his own page) and followed the lines as Picasso must have made them.   He misplaced the line of Stravinsky’s left shoulder, getting it too high.   Then when he got to the center of the drawing,  he had too much room left over.   To compensate, he made everything in the center of his drawing extra large.

He reported having an especially difficult time with the trousers, which was interesting because  he was actually not supposed to be ” drawing trousers”  or “hands,” but rather reproducing lines.  Still, he wanted to “draw hands” and “trousers,” so he kept trying to make the lines “make sense,” and the more he tried, the more confusing it became for him.  This is a perfect illustration of conflict between drawing what you see and drawing what you tell yourself is out  there.

What we did next is not part of Betty Edward’s curriculum.  We took a fresh copy of Picasso’s sketch of Stravinsky and cut it into sixteen equal pieces.  We shuffled the pile of pieces and each of us took three or four of them.  We then cut another piece of paper into sixteen equivolently sized morsels and tried to reproduced what we saw on the pieces we had taken from the shuffled pile.  We  placed our sixteen mini-drawings back on the original  to see how they fit.    Amazing.  We discovered that, collectively, we were able to better reproduce the drawing than we were individually.

Clearly it was an easier task.   First, we each had smaller numbers of lines to reproduce from any of the cut-up Picasso pieces and, secondly,  there was less  information about “hands,”  “faces” and “trousers” available to confuse us. This was great, because it made the point that if you can train yourself to see a line, which is not in itself a difficult task,  you can get your hand to follow it.  This generally yields a more accurate representation of what you’re trying to draw.