One great thing about drawing is that there is no studio or expensive materials needed. Just a pad of paper, a pencil, and your eye for detail. There is really no right tools and only one true requirement, to see.
In drawing it is important to be aware of how we use our eyes in the condustion of our everyday lives. To discover what adjustments we have to make to our perceptual processes to make successfull representational drawings. Now for your first excersise; go to your dinning room table, memorize it, every detail. Now go into a different room and write down a description of everything you saw. You may find it fairly simple. Now return to the room and again write another description. Your second, you shall find is much more ellaboate and finely detailed. Telling stories about individual objects and so forth.
The reson for this is simple, to force you to use your eyes. You first had to use your memory and may have been surprised to see how much you forgot. Then in using your eyes you gathered more info then your memory could hold.
A problem arises when you now try to translate this picture of observation into a drawing. Now draw the table as you saw it. You may find that you come up with something that doesnt really resemble what you know you see. try not to draw it as you wrote it (showing every object as it is indavidually) but as you see it. Make sure you remmeber that your eyes are everything. Most begginers find it hard to draw a table from where they are viewing it. Remember that you need to draw it as you actually saw it. You cant see all of each object. Now take a chair and sit about 9 feet from the table and draw it again. Remembering to use your eyes. Drawing what you see and not what you know is there. You now see how some objects are actually hidden by other objects. You now see how the chair is in front of the table so you cant see all of the table. You may still have the urge to tilt the table top so that you can see everything. Notice that this is not how it is visalbe. Try also to refrain yourself from drawing objects indavidually as a whole. One thing at a time, placing the table and chairs around them.
Remember there is nothing wrong with your eyes or the visual information that you are recieving. The problem is that you are not using the information in a pictoial way. It is not until begginers actually start to make a representational drawing of what he or she sees from a fixed viewpoint that it finally occurs that is is impossible to see an object in its entirety from a that viewpoint. For one, if you were now to move the chair you are sitting in one foot to the right you will now notice from that "fixed viewpoint" all the spaces and viewable areas of the objects in front of you have changed. From point one you may have been able to see a flower vase and now that you have moved to point two you may be able to see the cup that was sitting behind the vase, not visible from point one. You will always be fighting against your precieved experience of an object as distinct from your actual view of an abject when you start to draw.
We recieve way to much information through our eyes. Therefore we have to be selective when drawing, using only the visual information that can be recorded through a fixed viewpoint to draw. Selecting only the most useful things to develope our pictorial representation. Its not about seeing better, but seeing more selectively. Do not expect to be able to comprehend all of the asspects of drawing at once from the beggining. I will further outline several theories associated with representational drawing such as perspective, light, shade, tone, and so on. Try to avoid learning the steps in isolation. Work on your perspective, but make sure to use subject matter that is familiar to you, like your house, or your table. Something you have basic knowledge of. Also it is always better to draw directly from life. Try avoid using photographs and drawings because here the 3 dimensional world has already been changed to a 2 dimentional project. Our main purpose is to train you how to transfer the 3-D world you see to a 2-D flat form. Leave the photograph drawing till later, after you have practiced drawing from life. Practice makes perfect and first hand expierience is the finest teacher. Theories are useful-if kept in their place. You already posses all the tools to draw.
No comments:
Post a Comment