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Kindle Notes & Highlights
shapes, angles, and measurements
triggering
The less the conscious personality of the artist interferes, the more truthful and personal the tracing becomes.”
perspective, anatomy, foreshortening, light and shadow?
“innocent vision.”
“innocent vision.”
random imperfections,
shapes, tones, and textures
Try to break old seeing habits by assuming nothing about your subject.
subject. Shift from the language of things to the language of line and shape.
Be sure you are always drawing what you see rather than what you know.
“the language of lines”
it bypasses conscious thinking and critical dialogue and allows us to record only what we see.
The more we stay in the language of shapes, temporarily shunning the language of things, the more our resultant drawings resemble the reality of the things we have observed.
Draw large shapes first, then smaller shapes. Look for enrichment shapes, including highlights, shadows, reflections, patterns, and textures. Tie shapes together. When you see a “trapped” shape, draw it.
Select ahead of time certain areas of interest in your subject and concentrate on developing those areas first at the expense of others which are only briefly considered.
There is really no pressure to “finish,” so one may work as long as time, circumstance, and energy permit.
an objective and detached attitude.
These energetic strokes are darker and more decisive than those found in the other drawing.
The first lines are vague and loose but give direction f o r the more accurate lines to follow.
tight, thick swirls for the cypress trees, looser flowing swirls for clouds, short parallel strokes for wheat fields, and stipple dots for mown fields.
hatching.
crosshatching.
gradually less numerous and farther apart.
“I sometimes begin drawing with no preconceived problem to solve, with only the desire to use pencil or paper and make lines, tones, and shapes with no conscious aim; but as my mind takes in what is so produced, a point arrives where some idea crystallizes, and then a control and ordering begins to take place.”
more flexibility is obtained by shifting back and forth more frequently throughout.
Each shift is an unplanned event.
numerous shifts have been made along the way.
The Artisf's Handbook
Alternate Free and Control Hands
use of alignments is mixed in a busy potpourri of gesture strokes, restatements, blind drawing, smudging, and erasing.
Repeat to yourself even impressions that aren't physical characteristics:
the overall shape, midpoint line, and center line
“If you see a trapped shape, draw it.”
For hard edges, I try to stop my fill-in strokes right at the boundary lines. For soft edges, I run the strokes over the boundary line in a jagged manner.
the contrast is always greatest where the form turns.
The sphere, the cube, the cylinder, and the cone
The skillful manipulation of these two kinds of edges accounts for much of the quality we admire in a handsome tonal drawing.
An extreme form of backlighting called rim lighting creates very dramatic effects.
Clinging to mind-sets and failing to get the tonal range dark enough can make capturing a challenging scene nearly impossible.
local value
light side, shadow side, cast shadow, and reflected light.
Hard edges are decisive; soft edges are subtle.
subordinating detail but adding structure to the overall drawing.
In drawing through, we act as though our subject were transparent.
The vertical lines are all straight and parallel because they maintain their distance from us throughout their length.
“fresh and vivid contact.”
Repetition with variation is a design principle in both art and in nature.
When you understand drawing as a set of relationships, you grasp the key that things look large or small, coarse or smooth in relation to something else in the picture.
This is a highly stylized treatment, but within it there is room for subtle expression.
