I've just made a promise to myself that I will be writing every 20 minutes after I finish my every meal so you can look forward to read more articles from me (I eat a lot and often :-)). I set the time limit for 20 minutes to make this habit gradually and not to fire out after a few days.
Today, I would like to talk about two basic pillars of drawing and painting and representational art in general which I think you US and English speaking folks are maybe more familiar with than my brothers in the Czech Republic. I think that the main reason is that there's a lot more out there in therms of literature and resources on the web in English than it is in my native language. That is the reason that this very article is already released in Czech version on my blog.
The main two things to look out for when drawing and painting is:
GESTURE
STRUCTURE
I did not come up with it of course, I learnt this from my cyber-mentor Steve Huston, Stan Prokopenko, Jeff Watts to name a few. It is a basic idea of what the picture is all about when it comes to its foundation (another basic and vague Idea is composition but I will write about it in the future. Let's focus on the topic for a today's article:
GESTURE simply speaking is the fluidity, gracefulness of depicted subject. It is a basic "watery" idea of everything that is organic or alive. It is a graceful connection of the parts, it is a wholeness. We consist from 90 precent or so of water. GESTURE is the energy within us. As an analogy in music it is a whole composition, whole song with a massage to deliver. In dance it is the whole show.
Fir. 1. Examples of my gestural sketches. It is a good habit to set yourself a timer for 1 or 2 minutes to be forced to express only the motion within your object (in my case the figure). Just to be forced to express essentials.
If I were to describe STRUCTURE simply I would say that structure is the 3D feel of the subject of all the parts of it. It is a architecture of the subject. We try to describe it with the width, length and depth of a subject as soundly as we can with all the limitation that we have - 2D paper, canvas, mural wall. With structure we try to make an illusion of a 3D feeling on the flat surface.
There's miriad of tools to do that and I hope I'll be able to deliver all of them (or the majority of them) in the future posts.
Fig.2 My structural studies on the example of the arm and the thumb. As you can see in the arm example there are still visible so called "ghost lines", these are representative of the gesture that preceded the construction it self. From this we can say: GESTURE COMES FIRST! (those drawings are made on the basis of teaching by mr. Steve Huston)
Gesture is really the hardest part to jolt down. It is the most ethereal factor of the subject it is a right brain, subconscious feel for the figure or landscape or still life or animal to anything else. You have to try to find a long axis within your subject. The most energetic wave sort to speak. It is learnable but I believe it is a lifetime pursuit (again actually I've started to believe that based on the people that I admire - Steve Huston, Jeff Watts, Richard Schmidt, Sargent, Stan Prokopenko and the list could go forever! and I've started to believe that based on my practise also)
Structure is more logical pursuit to handle. We should study how to distill down a particular subject in order to describe the form - the structure - the architecture. In the case of human anatomy we should study how to convey any particular part and pose of it. There's a lot of literature how to do that and it is a great habit to have - just spent an hour or so studying (actually drawing) how to draw a hand, leg for example or how to convey house in perspective end so on.
In the case of a human firuge and portrait I highly recommend to check Stan's Prokopenko channel.
In the case of books I would start with Andrew Loomis's books (all of them)
Here's the side note:
In the art there's no rules there's only tools (Glenn Vilpu). If someone is a lot dogmatic about something be wary of that and always try to have some distance from the saying and use your conscience and independent will to decide if there's something useful about that saying. I want you to have this in mind for my future posts as well any time when I try to pass on some wisdom. Art Ain't dogmatic and that's a luxury that we artists have.
With that I want to say about this GESTURE - STRUCTURE relationship that the GESTURE COMES BEFORE STRUCTURE. It is wise to always find a gesture first - loose lines of action and put structure on top of it. It is the very essence of it and this relationship makes actually a lot of sense.
With that goes another warning - gesture-structure relationship is a balancing act - If we have to much of a gesture and no structure picture may look hazy, flat and without sense of depth. On the other hand to much structure can feel rigid and your graceful lady can end up looking like a Frankenstein.
Uff. That would be all from me for today. I think there's always something to say or discuss in the realm of art so if you would have a suggestion for a topic to cover or some ideas to add into a topic please feel free to express yourself in the comment section.
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Pete
and now just headphones (Tim Ferriss), coffee and a comic book making since there's a deadline
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