Secrets of drawing
When you set out to try and draw something, it feels like you have to get it right. The objective seems to be: I have to take what I see there and put it on my paper correctly. I have to be right. And the way to be right feels like it should go like this: “I will start with this piece, do it right and see it through, then I will move on to the next piece, do it right, and so on”. So you did your best to be right and to do it right. And yet …. and yet, it didn’t turn out so well, did it? If you’re lucky, the drawing has some good parts, but it doesn’t work overall. Maybe you can’t even say why that is. Just looks, feels wrong. You feel wrong and incapable. Is this you? Hang in there and read on.
As you were drawing, you may have felt your mind tell you something like: I have to draw an apple -ok, ok! I know what an apple looks like! So I will draw it how I know it to look like. I wrote more deeply about this in the post below.
This is especially true in drawing the human figure because we look at people all the time. We seek and look at faces all the time. And this makes us experts in a certain way. But it turns out that this “knowing” is an obstacle to drawing. What I mean by this is that we don’t know anything about what we are seeing in a way that can help us draw it. And drawing is an activity of learning about what we are looking at. When you start drawing, it is very common, especially for inexperienced artists, to focus on the end result and to not pay attention to the act of drawing and its real objectives.
I have always associated drawing with a thought process. I draw to explain something, to visualize something, to figure out how to put something together. Drawing is the effort to make sense, expressed visually. Think of making a plan for building something, with measurements and everything. Or a drawing that can help you think about how pieces of something might fit together. You might draw different angles or visualize invisible connections and so on. Drawing is always this.
If you are having a hard time with drawing, I want to propose that you try to approach it differently. Do not focus on achieving a certain result. Recognize that you don’t understand what you are looking at. Then, think of drawing as your path towards learning about what you’re looking at. The more you draw it, the deeper you are looking and the more you are seeing. I have been drawing for almost 40 years and, with every drawing I still have the same realization:
I thought I knew what I was looking at but as I draw it, I am starting to see things that I didn’t notice at first. And the more time I spend drawing, the more I am learning about my subject.
You’re now realizing that what you discover with your eyes is different from the assumptions your mind made before you started.
The idea is to start the drawing tentatively and look only for the big shapes and relationship between them. I really like a light, continuous line in the beginning. Giacometti’s drawings are a great example of this. There is a searching quality to his line. It feels like he was figuring out what he was looking at and getting closer with each repeated line.
It could be a good idea to start with an H pencil if you are having a hard time using a light touch at this stage. We want to build a drawing that has a high density of lines that get darker as you get more confident about what you are looking at.
I made you a demo of this idea. I compressed a 20 minute drawing into a 7 minute video with some commentary. The sound is kinda crap so sorry about that, I still don’t have a handle on the ideal a/v setup and workflow but I’ll get there eventually. I hope this video illustrates the approach that I have described above. This is always how I draw and it always serves me well. Give it a go and let me know how it worked out for you!