Well yes – it’s a quote with a very tenuous link to the drawing below but it’s a great quote and a great drawing. The point is – don’t overdo it and ruin it in the process. It’s not necessary to get bogged down in detail to convey the character and spirit of your subject. This is really a follow-up to my last post which looked at the advantages of allowing the mind of the viewer to complete the picture. I love this drawing (as those of you who have downloaded the e-b‎ook will know) and I realized after sending out last week’s post that it would have been the perfect example of what I was talking about.

Once you can see (or imagine you can see) the person in the portrait at least stop drawing for a while, stand back and ask yourself “does it need any more, or would it be a more evocative drawing if I left it as it is”.

All the best,

Hugh

‘The Artist’s Mother’ by Georges Seurat crayon on Michallet paper

About 1882 – 1883 12 x 9 3/16 in.

By permission of the John Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The portrait of Nicolas Cage below by Jason Mecier has been made simply by arranging junk on the floor and yet he has managed to catch that intense, slightly desperate and questioning look that Cage wears so much of the time.

All the best,

Hugh

'Self' by Cian Mcloughlin

'Mahshid' by Maryam Foroozanfar

A picture can please the eye or miss the mark in lots of different ways. Probably the most critical of all of these is it’s general composition. This is what will tell you whether you dislike a picture from twenty paces or like what you see enough to have a closer look. There have been a lot of theories about why we find certain compositions a pleasure to look at and others ugly, irritating, un-nerving etc. There are probably almost as many theories as people with opinions on the subject. Art is after all ‘in the eye of the beholder’ and everybody’s past experience is going to give them a different emotional response to the things they see. But even if it’s impossible to pin down exactly how to achieve a composition that’s going to have the desired effect on everyone who sees it, it’s still important to decide what you’re trying to achieve and to plan how you’re going to do it. Do you want the viewer to feel a sense of balance/harmony/juxtaposition/drama/…etc? Only once you know what impression you want to leave on the viewer can you make any sensible decisions about the composition.

There are some useful ‘rules of thumb’ that can be found in many good books and in chapter 5 of my eBook. These will tell you how best to employ vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines, negative space, curves, squareness, roundness, etc. But the best gauge of a composition is you. How does it make you feel?

Always think in terms of the ‘Big Picture’, the whole frame. The big shapes are the most important – areas of light and dark, the contour of forms, the negative shapes between forms and each other and between forms and the frame of the picture.

Avoid too much detail – It will draw the eye and steal the attention away from the overall design, the overall impression you want to make. If what you draw is an accurate enough description of the subject the details will be filled in, subconsciously, in the mind of the viewer with far more clarity and realism than it’s possible to draw. I once had a job building scenery at Twickenham film studios and was amazed at the realism the scenery painters could achieve using eight and ten-inch rollers. They could spend half an hour on a backdrop that, from up close, would look like a mess of green paint but through the ‘eye’ of the camera, thirty feet away, would look like a formal garden with benches and trimmed privet hedges in dappled sunlight. Seen through the French windows at the back of the set you wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see someone walk over and sit on one of the benches in the shade of a tree.

'First of the Summer Light' by James Hart Dyke

One measure of a good picture is how long people want to look at it. Personally I like to walk around art galleries at a fairly brisk pace but occasionally you come across a painting or a drawing that you want to sit and gaze at for a long time. These are always pictures that are well balanced. If they were a musical phrase they would be described as ‘resolved’. There’s a lack of tension because no part of the scene is fighting for attention and no change needs to happen for the scene to be settled. It’s as peaceful a sight as dogs sleeping in the sun, the ‘pecking order’ already established and everything at rest. A picture that is relaxing to look at is attractive for obvious reasons but I think what keeps us looking at it for a long time is the sensation that we’re witnessing a scene in real time, as if through a window, rather than looking at a snapshot, a frozen moment in time. Lack of detail encourages this illusion. Since the detail is being added by the mind of the viewer it can change from one moment to the next.

I try to avoid drawing portraits of people smiling for the same reason. Nobody has a smile permanently fixed on their face and so when you see a picture of someone smiling you know you’re looking at a snapshot of that person in a moment at some point in the past. If they’re face is at rest, and it’s a convincing enough portrait, you can experience almost the same feeling looking at the picture as you would have seeing the person ‘in the flesh’. It seems to me that this is a requirement for a portrait to have ‘presence’.

'Parky' by Jonathon Yeo

Something that’s more difficult to achieve but can give even more life to a picture is capturing the way a person’s face looks as it changes from one expression to another. The look on a person’s face, for example, as the thought is going through their head that is going to make them smile, the seed of a smile just beginning to grow. Again, this can give you the feeling that you’re actually witnessing the event take place.

The Picture Plane

This is a very simple but very important concept. Imagine the Picture Plane as a sheet of glass between you and what you’re drawing. It makes no difference how far away you imagine it is. Now close one eye and imagine everything you see is squashed flat onto the back of the glass, like a picture on a TV screen. This translates all the perspective and foreshortening you can see into flat two-dimensional shapes that can be copied onto your paper. This must be done with one eye closed because each eye will see these shapes in different positions. We’ll come to perspective in a minute but, for now, just remember that the ‘Horizon Line’ runs across the picture plane at eye level, or to put it another way, your eye level is called the ‘horizon line’ – meaning you’re looking down on anything
below it and you’re looking up at anything above it. It’s important to imagine the picture plane in open space so that your drawing board doesn’t ‘puncture’
it. They are not the same thing and shouldn’t be confused with each other. Nothing can occupy the same space as the picture plane, otherwise you would see
a cross-section of the object in your drawing!

Once you can see everything on this imaginary ‘surface’ you don’t need to think about perspective and foreshortening. All shapes on the picture plane are flat. It takes some practice to see foreshortened objects as flat shapes (and it always helps to close one eye), but once it clicks you’ll find drawing everything a lot easier.

A good way to get used to the concept of a picture plane in portrait drawing is to stand or sit in front of a mirror and draw yourself or anything else you can see, with your wax pencil, and with one eye closed, straight onto the mirror. Try to choose subjects that are turned at awkward angles and foreshortened. Another way of achieving the same affect is to stand inside a window and trace the objects outside straight onto the window pane, again making sure you keep one eye closed. This is supposedly what Hans Holbein (official portrait painter in the court of Henry Vlll) used to do before transferring his drawings onto paper. Yet another way of practising this is to balance your sheet of glass on the outstretched fingers of one hand and to trace around it’s contour with the other.

When drawing or painting anything, but particularly portraits, you should regularly stand back about ten feet and check that it still resembles your model and that there are no glaring errors that you haven’t noticed close up. You’ll be amazed how different it looks from a distance The image below was made by Aude Oliva at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has kindly given us permission to reproduce it here. It really requires no more explanation than to tell you that close up it looks like Albert Einstein and from about ten feet away it looks like Marilyn Monroe. Need I say more? Drawing portraits requires some legwork. If you regularly take a moment to stand well back from your picture you’ll save yourself a lot of time that you’ll otherwise spend undoing work you’ve already done.

By Aude Oliva at MIT

Hatching

I like to balance periods of constant steady activity with periods of thoughtful reflection. Both modes are necessary to take a sensitive drawing to completion and they provide the perfect balance to each other. A useful exercise to encourage yourself to switch from one mode to the other is to remind yourself of the gesture.

It helps to follow a logical sequence when hatching, developing the whole drawing simultaneously. It’s up to you how far you take it, how much coverage you aim for. I tend to keep line drawings fairly light and sensitive, treating the half tones as part of the lights, not part of the shadows, but every drawing you do will suggest a different approach and the composition will have a lot to do with your decision. If you feel you want to build your drawing up into a solid, or almost solid, mass of shading you can.

A very gentle approach to hatching is to treat your drawing a bit like a sculpture, gradually teasing the form out with successive ‘washes’ of light hatching with a 2H or even 4H pencil. After mapping out an area work your way across it from the soft edge of the form shadows into the darker core of the shadow. Personally I like to roam around the drawing rather than add shading progressively from one side to the other. Forget about time and don’t worry about which bit you focus on next. Let your attention wander wherever it wants to, allocate tonal values to each area of the subject and bring the whole drawing along as a whole.

You can take a more robust approach to your hatching but you should be wary of shading large areas in one go as it tends to flatten the drawing, making it hard to see the form, so only ever lay down large areas as a foundation for other layers.

It’s the looseness in a drawing, the degree of ‘play’ around what is strictly accurate, that gives a picture it’s vitality. It’s this tolerance that Harold Speed referred to as ‘dither’, which nicely conveys both the sense of movement and the uncertainty or ambiguity that’s inherent in anything that’s alive. Within this dither is where the expression of the artist and the spirit of the picture resides. It’s this sense of movement that gives the viewer the impression that they are witnessing a moment in the passage of time, rather than something which is frozen. A nice crisp double line with an extremely sharp pencil often gives an air of assurance to the line, whilst also introducing an element of ‘dither’, of life and movement.

By Harold Speed

A danger of taking a very delicate approach is that you can become so nervous of being heavy-handed, or of making a ‘mistake’, that it takes a long time to build a portrait with any real substance to it. You mustn’t be precious with your drawings. Equally – don’t be casual. You shouldn’t make a mark unless you think it will improve the drawing but don’t worry about making mistakes. These early drawings are not for show – their purpose is to teach you how to make drawings that you can show. You have to make the mistakes in order to identify them and correct them. The more you put into the process the more you’ll get out of it. Push your limits. Always embrace the opportunity to try something for the first time. You never know – it might turn out to be your signature technique!

Don’t worry about over-working a drawing at this stage. As part of the learning process it’s important to see where drawings can get to after developing them for different periods of time. Your must aim to express yourself freely and swiftly. The pleasure and sense of excitement in a picture is the result of the fluidity that comes with working at a certain speed. You mustn’t ever rush yourself and you shouldn’t make marks without considering first how they’re going to look on the paper but you should always be aiming to get quicker.

Experiment with your cross-hatching. Back-stroking can help to keep it regular and is worth practicing anyway because there will be times when it will be helpful to work from the other direction. Remember – you must concentrate on every line. If you don’t it will show and can ruin a drawing. Leonardo DaVinci was masterful at cross-hatching. If you examine his drawings closely you’ll see that he took tremendous care over every single stroke. It doesn’t have to be done at speed but it does help to develop a smooth rhythm; this will keep your strokes even in weight, length, and direction. The deliberate absence of ‘ticks’ in your hatching is the detail we’re after, total dedication to making every mark contribute to the drawing, with no consideration at all of how long it’s taking. Better to have one good mark on your paper than a finished bad drawing. This is a bigger challenge than achieving a likeness. It’s possible for a perfect likeness still to be an ugly drawing, in the same way one can take a bad photograph. Only by focussing completely on the quality of every mark you make will you end up with a great drawing. The speed will come with practice.

Great art has all the spontaneity and vitality of primitive art but with the refinement of technique that is now available to us. If you’re always aiming for perfection in your drawings you’ll always get as close to perfection as your ability allows – not perfection in terms of accuracy (there’s no such thing), but perfection in terms of the most expressive and most attractive marks. It’s the ultimate outlet for a perfectionist. If you’re not one already you should consider becoming one. This doesn’t need to be learnt – it’s just a state of mind that can be adopted (or discarded) in a second, which is why artists, like everyone else, have good days and bad days. On their good days they were immersed in their work and were aiming for perfection. On their bad days they weren’t. Please don’t misunderstand me – nobody’s perfect (least of all me), but to want to achieve the best result is something we can all do, if not all the time, then often.