11-22-2019, 08:05 AM
darktiste, everyone can be a critic, but not everyone can help. Sometimes, showing up and talking down to people without offering any substantial help, is kind of annoying. No need to go around giving people your own "grades".
So in regards to all your drawings here, maybe we should have a quick chat on the nature of drawing.
There's a problem with drawing in general that artists need to solve. It's basically that the world isn't made up of lines, rather it's just a bunch of color shapes hitting our retina, no real lines in existence. So are we doing something wrong by using lines? is the answer to just make everything a mass drawing rather than using lines? Well the artist and theoretician Max Meldrum thought so and was a strong advocate for excluding lines from art and only focusing on masses. That being said, there are interesting ways to solve this problem of lines not really existing.
One idea is that lines represent an end or segmentation of form. So in a sense, contour drawing. This is often a good start when thinking about drawing where you're representing the object itself rather than its visual impression, like the opposite of impressionist mass drawing. It lets you represent the form of the subject and allows you to concentrate on proportions, gesture, design, and form without having to worry about much else. This however is very difficult to represent something faithfully because it can often lack many of the visual qualities that we want a drawing to have. One of the better examples of this particular style of drawing can be this Julien drawing https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zriAVm7xjIc/S...rofile.gif
So one of the traditional ways to get more of the impression into the drawing is to take the basic line drawing and then begin to model some of the light and shade, bringing more of the impression to life. When doing this, it's important to remember how you're most likely representing softer shapes of value so your shading and half-tones need to be softer while still having some unity to the shapes. It's what is done in the Julien drawing but another traditional example is this Holbein drawing https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/...HKM9ZmiAkA
Values however aren't particularly good in drawing as a medium so you usually need to compress your value range because pencils just don't get very dark without harming the paper. So with compressing, you can think of this like how you over expose a camera, everything beyond a certain point is just pure white, regardless if there's variation in the very light parts. You can then do the same with the shadows, allowing you to work more comfortably with tones without either having to add super dark values or having to model all the half-tones making it look very low contrast. This is a good skill to learn because you will often be drawing or painting things where you just can't be as light or dark in your medium as real life, so being able to compress the values lets you paint it naturalistically without sacrificing the big impression/contrast. I made this drawing as an example of how this is done. Notice how there are half tones in the reference in the light areas that are excluded because they are too light, and the same with the dark for the things that are too dark to represent. So this preserves the big contrast and impression with a limited value range.
(this is an approach Meldrum would approve of, notice how there are no lines, only masses of tone)
There is another approach to drawing that shows up here and there historically in various forms. The idea is in a sense an impressionist approach to drawing where you no longer draw the "object" but rather it's impression, yet you do not draw in "tones", just lines. The way you do this is to re-consider what a line is, no longer representing form but rather just a change in contrast. So imagine a figure lit against a medium value background. In some parts the light will hit the form, making the contour between the light and background strong, because it's a light skin value against a medium value background, giving that contour contrast. This is also done to the shadow, so you look at its contrast against the medium value background and it's probably a dark value (the shadow) against the lighter medium value background, so you represent that area with a line too.
However at some point there will be a half-tone value where it's difficult to see the difference between it and the background, and in these places, we either draw very light lines, or no line at all. So in a simple sense, we draw a line and the value of the line corresponds with the contrast we see.
I know this is a bit abstract and weird but I did this quick sketch as an example. Notice how for example the top part of her forehead has a very low contrast against the background so it's a very light line I've drawn there. Then bellow that the front part of her forehead has a very strong contrast with the background so I drew a dark line there. This is a kind of method where you can be impressionistic and naturalistic with lines, even though they technically don't exist in reality. By just using them to show contrast, we can simulate the visual impression without having to add tone.
So with all this, this isn't to say you have to draw in one of these particular ways. It's just to outline some different points of view in drawing that are worth thinking about. Most traditional artists have a hybrid of these approaches, some more concerned with the "object" others more interested with the impression. I hope this gives you some stuff to think about, experiment with and can hopefully be helpful in your drawings.
So in regards to all your drawings here, maybe we should have a quick chat on the nature of drawing.
There's a problem with drawing in general that artists need to solve. It's basically that the world isn't made up of lines, rather it's just a bunch of color shapes hitting our retina, no real lines in existence. So are we doing something wrong by using lines? is the answer to just make everything a mass drawing rather than using lines? Well the artist and theoretician Max Meldrum thought so and was a strong advocate for excluding lines from art and only focusing on masses. That being said, there are interesting ways to solve this problem of lines not really existing.
One idea is that lines represent an end or segmentation of form. So in a sense, contour drawing. This is often a good start when thinking about drawing where you're representing the object itself rather than its visual impression, like the opposite of impressionist mass drawing. It lets you represent the form of the subject and allows you to concentrate on proportions, gesture, design, and form without having to worry about much else. This however is very difficult to represent something faithfully because it can often lack many of the visual qualities that we want a drawing to have. One of the better examples of this particular style of drawing can be this Julien drawing https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zriAVm7xjIc/S...rofile.gif
So one of the traditional ways to get more of the impression into the drawing is to take the basic line drawing and then begin to model some of the light and shade, bringing more of the impression to life. When doing this, it's important to remember how you're most likely representing softer shapes of value so your shading and half-tones need to be softer while still having some unity to the shapes. It's what is done in the Julien drawing but another traditional example is this Holbein drawing https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/...HKM9ZmiAkA
Values however aren't particularly good in drawing as a medium so you usually need to compress your value range because pencils just don't get very dark without harming the paper. So with compressing, you can think of this like how you over expose a camera, everything beyond a certain point is just pure white, regardless if there's variation in the very light parts. You can then do the same with the shadows, allowing you to work more comfortably with tones without either having to add super dark values or having to model all the half-tones making it look very low contrast. This is a good skill to learn because you will often be drawing or painting things where you just can't be as light or dark in your medium as real life, so being able to compress the values lets you paint it naturalistically without sacrificing the big impression/contrast. I made this drawing as an example of how this is done. Notice how there are half tones in the reference in the light areas that are excluded because they are too light, and the same with the dark for the things that are too dark to represent. So this preserves the big contrast and impression with a limited value range.
(this is an approach Meldrum would approve of, notice how there are no lines, only masses of tone)
There is another approach to drawing that shows up here and there historically in various forms. The idea is in a sense an impressionist approach to drawing where you no longer draw the "object" but rather it's impression, yet you do not draw in "tones", just lines. The way you do this is to re-consider what a line is, no longer representing form but rather just a change in contrast. So imagine a figure lit against a medium value background. In some parts the light will hit the form, making the contour between the light and background strong, because it's a light skin value against a medium value background, giving that contour contrast. This is also done to the shadow, so you look at its contrast against the medium value background and it's probably a dark value (the shadow) against the lighter medium value background, so you represent that area with a line too.
However at some point there will be a half-tone value where it's difficult to see the difference between it and the background, and in these places, we either draw very light lines, or no line at all. So in a simple sense, we draw a line and the value of the line corresponds with the contrast we see.
I know this is a bit abstract and weird but I did this quick sketch as an example. Notice how for example the top part of her forehead has a very low contrast against the background so it's a very light line I've drawn there. Then bellow that the front part of her forehead has a very strong contrast with the background so I drew a dark line there. This is a kind of method where you can be impressionistic and naturalistic with lines, even though they technically don't exist in reality. By just using them to show contrast, we can simulate the visual impression without having to add tone.
So with all this, this isn't to say you have to draw in one of these particular ways. It's just to outline some different points of view in drawing that are worth thinking about. Most traditional artists have a hybrid of these approaches, some more concerned with the "object" others more interested with the impression. I hope this gives you some stuff to think about, experiment with and can hopefully be helpful in your drawings.
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