Sketching out the window, at Saloniki in Harvard Square

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
 What's all this Gesture Drawing Stuff, Anyway? The internet is full of tutorials on gesture drawing, and many of them are rather good, so I won't repeat that work here. Instead, I hope to offer a lucid explanation of what gesture drawing actually is, which is much harder to find. I think learning it becomes much easier if you understand the target, and a lot of the explanations I have found online are confusing and muddled. Let's see if we can't rectify that. Motion is something humans had never actually seen in detail until Eadweard Muybridge published his book in the late 19th century. Muybridge was an early pioneer of high-speed photography, and his book contained frame-by-frame stills of athletes performing various feats. The painter Francis Bacon heavily referenced this book for the figures in his paintings. However, this sort of high-speed motion goes by too quickly to be observed with the naked eye, so we are not accustomed to seeing it frozen in time. Because o...
Read more
Draw what you See Something that art students are very commonly told when they're just starting out is, draw what you see, not what you know. This advice is poorly worded, and bears some explanation. It's good advice, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far. When we are beginners, we can't draw what we know, because we don't know anything, and everything we think we know is wrong. By telling us to draw what we see, our teachers are really trying to get us to stop drawing in glyphs like children, and instead to start observing the world around us. But when we start doing this, we will soon discover that it's impossible to draw what you see. There are two levels of translation in every drawing. First, what you see needs to be simplified down to something that is possible to reproduce in the medium you are using. Even if you are using a graphite pencil set, you don't have anywhere near the value range that exists in nature. Even if you have a full set of ...
Read more
Image
Doing Fast Perspective Setups in the Field Part 2: Some concepts I would like to start by preemptively answering the question, "Why can't I just copy what I see?" If you are able to do it, then it's an option, but I have tried this in the past, and everything I draw comes out just a little bit wonky if I don't bother to reconcile it with a horizon line and vanishing points.  Some people get around this using tools like a viewfinder that has a grid on it, but this leaves you unable to change anything you see.  While sketching outdoors, I usually cannot stand exactly where I would like to, to get exactly the view I want, because that would have me standing in the middle of the street. It's also helpful to be able to rotate things, move the camera up or down for dramatic effect, widen the angle of view past what the human eye can actually see, or introduce fisheye effects.  All these things become possible with a basic working knowledge of perspective. Despite ha...
Read more