Seeing (part 4)

 

Measuring, flattening space, and controlling left-brain memories are essential skills, but several additional concepts can greatly enhance your seeing capabilities.

 

Other Kinds of Relationships

Once you have developed some skill at seeing flat, other comparisons beyond simple spatial and size relationships become possible.  Parallel relationships and lines that flow into other lines are examples.

 It takes only a little practice to develop the skill of seeing parallel relationships or lines that extend into other lines once you understand the trick of perceiving gaps.  Try this: Look for parallel lines that stretch the limits of your perception.  Take Example 20.  You could use the angle of the student’s upper arm resting on the table.  It happens to be parallel to the receding edge of the desk beside him.  And that, in turn, is “lined up” with the lower edge of the box surrounding the shapes on the dry erase board. 

 

 To help you understand this you can make your own “relational” seeing exercises.  Try looking for parallel curves or other shapes that are similar to each other. (Look at Example 19 again and then look at examples 20-5 and 20-6.) 

So, you can begin to understand that flattening space (mentally) not only helps us improve the accuracy of our pictures, it also opens up other, more advanced ideas about the way in which we construct them. 

The possibilities are limitless.  This ability to notice and apply a subtext of consciously perceived relationships, which anyone can acquire with a little practice and imagination, lies at the heart of compositional structure that one discovers in the drawings and paintings of the Masters. See Examples 21, 22, and 23.

By looking at a group of objects without focusing on any one object within the group you can perceive relationships between objects, distances between objects, size comparisons of objects, parallel relationships, and other spatial information that is not available to you if you only let your left-brain take over and focus on individual objects.

 

Lose control early to gain control later

In my work with students, I have come to realize that in many cases the problem of getting lost in the details of objects could be alleviated by simply changing the way the pencil is held during the initial stages (the blocking-in stages) of the drawing.  Normally, whenever you find yourself gripping a writing instrument (Example #30), you’re getting ready to engage in some detail-oriented process like writing down a phone number or doing a math problem. So, your mind is trained to start focusing from the instant you pick up the pencil.

By gripping the pencil in a way that prevents you from drawing details, you have immediately taken away the ability to be in control—which can be scary.  When I encourage students to use a more relaxed grip as in Example 31, they are often uncomfortable at first.  They feel the loss of control.   But, losing control is exactly what you should do at the blocking-in stage of a drawing.  You are only interested in very loosely and lightly sketching out the size and location relationships of the objects anyway!  So, holding the pencil loosely will keep you out of the left-brain detail mode, and help you concentrate on getting the relationships in the drawing correct.

 

Example #30 Control position; working on details

Example #31  Allow the pencil to float—holding it loosely with thumb, index and middle fingers (not touching the fleshy web between index finger and thumb).  This prevents you from focusing on details, which inevitably happens if you are holding the pencil like an accountant (control mode, Example #30).

Remember, you only want to be setting up the image by drawing “blob” shapes very lightly but in the correct spatial and size relationships to the other “blob” designated objects.  So, no details.  Everything drawn very lightly.  The advantage of this technique—blocking-in marks drawn faintly—allows you to add the finishing details later without having to erase.

 

Use the same process on any subject.  Notice the torso of the nude is treated as a parallelogram.  You can simplify the thigh jutting forward as a plexiglass cylinder, correctly sized and placed to which you then add details. 

 

  See the next section.

 

Avoiding names for objects

In this process of translating 3-D information into a 2-D representation of that information, the more you can objectify the things you are trying to depict, the more successful you will be.  “Objectification,” in this context, is to see the object as a simple geometric shape. The blocking-in process uses this notion.

 

Look at the above example to see a problem that commonly comes up for students when they are drawing from live models.  A student, when confronted with a foreshortened view of a portion of the body—the thigh for example—may have a great deal of trouble trying to draw it correctly as seen.  Here again, that old left-brain dominance is the likely culprit. What may be happening is that the student’s left-brain has a mental picture of a thigh which it tries to impose on the drawing.  Since that mental picture has little to do with the actual scene the student is observing, the result is usually a very distorted or bent-down (differently angled) version of the thigh that has no resemblance to the actual image.  In cases like this, I suggest the student try to visualize the thigh not as a thigh but rather as a transparent section of Plexiglas pipe.  (Plexiglas pipe is a good substitute in this case.  Since it’s a visually neutral object, the student probably won’t have an existing mental picture of it.)  On seeing a piece of pipe, the student only needs to approximate the overlap between the openings at either end, and then refine the thigh shape-contours to that construct.  See Diagram F-1 and This, Not This diagram that follows.

 

 

 

The resulting drawing is close to the observed configuration because the left-brain “thigh” memory wasn’t required to create it.  

Converting familiar but difficult-to-draw objects into simplified forms, takes away their name/memory relationship and makes them much easier to draw correctly.  This is closely related to the concept of blocking in.  The main difference in this example is the addition of a 3-D component that comes into play when the student visualizes both ends of the transparent cylinder.  Most blocking in needs only flattened shapes to represent elements in the composition so that their relative placement and size are initially established.

 

Summary

I cannot stress enough the need to be able to see correctly.  If you bypass this step, it might derail all your subsequent efforts at improving.

 

The next step for you as a student is to practice these techniques for a week or two to ensure that you have mastered them and can use them in your future drawing.   To recap, here’s what you should be working on:

 

·                  ·     Measuring techniques:     Sight with your pencil to make relative size comparisons and to measure angles              for translation to a flat drawing surface

• Seeing flat, understand and use gaps:   Consciously visualize spaces between objects—get used to the idea that spaces and objects are coequal
 
• Looking for relationships between things:   revisit  Seeing (part two)   “Relationships”
• Control the tendency for the left side memories of things from taking over in the middle of a drawing.  Embrace “measuring” to help you to avoid overreliance on existing memories

You have now reached an important plateau.  You can correctly draw what you see.  This doesn’t mean that every drawing will come out as you want it, but with your newly acquired skills you will be able to identify and correct problems of spacing and relative size in your drawings.  Over time, as you continue to draw, the number of corrections you have to make will be fewer.

 

Once you understand the process of “artistic seeing” you will be able to correct your own drawings and the progress you make developing your skill should be much more rapid.

 

Next, the three kinds of memory.