Drawing and Painting the Nude

Chapter 2

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Linear drawing exercises

Study after Egon Schiele.

You learn how to play the piano by practising your scales, which develop your muscle memory and teach you how the notes interrelate to each other. In much the same way you can use drawing exercises to loosen up and 'get your eye in', or simply explore new ways of drawing. A long life-drawing session can start off with some quick drawing to give you a quick overview of the pose. Blind drawing (described later in this chapter) can allow you the time to really look at the figure and begin to understand the tiny changes in direction of form and contour. Thinking across the figure can improve your understanding of proportion. All of the exercises in this chapter are aimed at improving your perception of the figure, to allow you to see it more objectively.

LESSON 1

The fallibility of memory

Before you read on, open a sketchbook and turn to the last page. Everyone feels that the first page of the sketchbook is intimidating, as you feel that you have to do something good in it. So turn to the back and think of this as the place where you can put your reflections about your drawing activities.

Now draw a parent from memory (or some other significant relative). Take about five minutes for the exercise. It might be interesting to give this challenge to a few friends and, if they are willing, compare your results with theirs.

Does your drawing look like your parent (or this other relative)? Is your drawing a photo-realistic rendition? Or perhaps does this drawing look like the kind of drawing that a ten-year-old might do? Are there similarities between your drawing and your friends' drawings? Despite the years you may have known that parent, your visual memory is poor; this proves that when drawing you really need to minimize the time spent between looking at the figure and looking at your paper and back again to the figure. In fact, you should spend longer looking at the figure and less time looking at the paper.

LESSON 2

Shape drawing

The key point in this exercise is to try to see differently and to stop thinking, 'I am drawing an arm, so I need to work out how to draw an arm.' Instead the focus should be, 'I am drawing this shape, so what kind of shape is this?'

Materials:

• Biro
• Sketchbook

Look at the image at the beginning of the chapter and try to make a copy of it using your biro. Give yourself ten minutes for this exercise. When you have finished make a note by the side of the drawing of the date, the time you took to complete it, and the technique you used on the drawing. Now turn this book upside down and repeat the exercise. Try to give yourself the same time and use the same media. Once you have finished the drawing, once again make a note of the time, duration and technique used.

Now photocopy your drawing. Take a pencil and a ruler and draw through the diagonals.

Place a sheet of your paper on top of this page. Mark off the height and the width of the image by resting your paper against the original and transfer the dimensions to find the exact size of the rectangle. Lightly divide this box on your paper with pencil divisions to match the same divisions in this illustration. Working triangle by triangle, what shape is in each one? Think carefully about the line and how and where it bisects each diagonal, horizontal and vertical. Try to spend about fifteen minutes on drawing this again, using a biro. In the back of your sketchbook look at your three drawings the right way up: is there a difference, and if so what is it? Have you learned something in the process? Is one drawing more accurate than another? You will see that each drawing has improved and that your level of observational accuracy is already better.

Study after Egon Schiele.

Dividing up: at the intersection of the diagonal, draw a vertical and a horizontal. Where these bisect the top and bottom and left and right sides, join these up, forming four more sets of diagonals. Construct more vertical and horizontal divisions. Look at the boxes and consider their complexity. Continue this process of diagonal divisions forming horizontal and vertical grids. Note that not all boxes need to be divided.

On copying

We learn to speak by copying the sounds emitted by our parents' mouths. From our initial 'ga-ga' noises we begin to articulate words and also make connections between the meanings of those sounds. We can learn a lot about drawing in the same way. Not only do we need to learn the fundamental visual perception skills to enable us to see and therefore be able to draw, we need to look at a lot of drawings and paintings and learn from them.

Picasso said, 'Good artists copy, great artists steal.' The real trick then is not to just copy, but to consider what you learn from looking at others work and apply it to your own visual problems.

LESSON 3

Tape drawing and enlarging

You can draw with many things, and it can be really challenging to draw with a material that is not usually used to make a drawing. In this exercise you are going to draw with electrical tape. A good linear drawing is a great source for this. It is also important to learn how you can enlarge or reduce your work for transcription to another support. Although all rectangles are quadrilaterals, each rectangle has a specific ratio between the shorter and longer side.

Materials:

• Black electrical tape
• Pencil
• 1m ruler or some cotton thread
• Masking tape
• Scissors
• Scalpel
• Cutting mat
• Set square

Time: approx. 2-3 hours

Choose a suitable drawing and grid it up, using the example as a guide. Produce an enlarged version of the rectangle by taping thread to one corner and extending it outward so that it is the same angle as the diagonal in the original. Now draw the opposite diagonal to find the centre of this bigger rectangle. Construct your perpendicular horizontal and vertical divisions as before (a T square is really useful here) until you have made either in pencil or thread a grid that resembles the grid on your original. Now really concentrate on the white shapes made by the line and the triangles. Try to recreate the positive line made in the drawing by cutting the insulation tape so that it resembles the line and sticking it down on the paper. Be careful not to pull the tape too taut when you stick it down as the tension in it will cause it to lift.

A five-minute partial peek drawing has been chosen from which to make a tape drawing.

Tape drawing: thread has been used to create the grid and the black insulation tape has been cut and shaped to mimic the line quality.

None of these rectangles share the same diagonal so they are all in a different proportion to each other.

When rectangles share the same proportion they all share the same diagonal. Using your copy paper, place the paper against an illustration in this book. Mark off the rectangle using your set square. Place this rectangle into the top left corner of some A1 paper (or top right if you are left-handed). Place cotton thread through the diagonal of your little rectangle and extend it outwards until you create an enlarged rectangle, which is in the same proportion as the smaller one.

LESSON 4

Negative painting

It is important early on to link the idea that 'drawing is painting and painting is drawing' (Piers Ottey in conversation with the author). A larger brush can produce a very fine line if you paint the spaces either side of the line leaving a gap for the line to appear. In this exercise we will explore the idea of negative painting, i.e. something can be painted by painting the space around it rather than the thing itself.

Materials:

• Heavier weight cartridge paper
• Black and white acrylic paint
• Pencil
• Brush
• Small geometry set square
• Photocopy of a linear drawing

First, paint up a piece of paper in black, about A4 size (approx. 20 × 30cm). Once this is dry, place your set square on the top edge and draw your vertical and horizontal corners and lengths.

Now place the photocopy into the corner and lay your ruler across the diagonal of this image to transcribe this rectangle. Transfer the same grid and paint only the white shapes of the image, leaving a gap between the areas of black to create the lines. Once again look at the two drawings you have made. You can take a photograph of your big drawing and put a printout of it in your sketchbook alongside your white space painting. What was challenging about the task? Was one easier than the other? How do these drawings compare with your first attempts? Look back at the original drawing you worked from. Are there discrepancies that have been magnified in the negative painting because of working from the tape drawing? Now correct the negative painting by repainting with both black and white paint.

Negative painting: the paper was painted with black acrylic and then the negative space was painted with white paint.

LESSON 5

Self portrait

Self portrait. In this instance the mirror was gridded using a marker pen. Care was taken to ensure that the head lined up with the...