Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Drawing from life is not so much about making marks than it is about
observation and seeing;
not
just looking is the most important aspect of life
drawing. This skill takes time and practice to develop.
The great cartoon animator Chuck Jones, in his topic
Chuck Amuck
, spoke about
his life drawing teacher, who is reputed to have said that each artist had 100,000
bad drawings in them and the sooner they worked through those to reach the
better ones underneath, the better. I couldn't agree more. Life drawing, according
to Richard Williams, is the antidote to those artists and designers that have found
a formula to drawing solutions, formulas that rely on the tricks they have learned,
the shortcuts and simplistic visual symbols that present a substitute for the real
thing. Academic drawing provides an understanding of form, line, and volume
and enables the artist to look with a keener and more critical eye.
Before you even start to make a drawing, you need to give some
consideration to what it is you want the drawing to achieve. Establish the
reason you are making the drawing and what your drawing is about. This
might sound obvious, but unless you have established these goals at the
outset, you will have no way to measure whether the drawing is a successful
one or not. If you have no clear aims for your drawings, they are more likely to
become unfocused, failing to provide you with any really useful information
or extend your knowledge of a subject. Without a clear aim for your drawings,
they cannot help solve any of the problems you intended the drawing process
to address in the first place.
By limiting the scope of your drawing, the more likely your drawing is to
surrender the results you are looking for. You should aim for a drawing to
address only a single topic at a time, or at least a very limited range of topics.
Issues such as volume or weight, line, light, space, or any one of a hundred
other different topics are more likely to be fully explored and therefore likely
FIG 7.6
Line work.
(a)
(b)
