The Road to 10 Unknowns

(Note:  The original graphics links are not working anymore.  Please refer to the author's website for the same at James McMullan | Artist and Illustrator)

In this last column of the series, I will show you the process of conceptual thinking, sketching, research photos, painting and lettering that led to a finished theater poster, in this case one for Jon Robin Baitz's play "Ten Unknowns," which was presented at Lincoln Center Theater in 2001.

Nearly all the steps in creating the poster involved drawing.

In "Ten Unknowns," Malcolm Raphelson, the central character played by Donald Sutherland, is a figurative artist who had a period of New York success in the late 1940s, just before the rise of Abstract Expressionism as the dominant painting style.

As the play begins, it is now the 1990s, and Malcolm has retreated to a remote Mexican town, dispirited and contemptuous of the current art world. His art dealer, trying to encourage him to exhibit again, has sent him a young man to assist him in his work. Crassly oversimplifying a plot that has two other characters and many dramatic interweaving tensions, the central crux of the story is that Malcolm is in a state of deep creative anxiety, so incapacitating, questions arise regarding recent paintings in the studio. Did Malcolm actually paint the pictures? Or are they the work of the young assistant?

Although this mystery involving the paintings and the relationship between the assistant and Malcolm was intriguing, I felt it was too complicated to represent visually, so I chose to use the more fundamental dilemma of the artist facing painter's block as the conceptual theme of my poster.

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The idea of facing an imaginative void made me think about an actual void, the empty canvas, or an empty sheet of paper, and how that moment of beginning is loaded with possibility and fear. In these first sketches, I am playing with a straightforward depiction of the artist facing the blank canvas, an artist becoming a canvas, an artist painting in the wrong direction and an artist seen through a transparent canvas.

Any of these ideas might, with some inspired painting, have been turned into a poster, yet none felt right. There's a theory about writing that applies - that, when you reach a serious sticking point, the key to moving on successfully is to throw out the element that you had been hanging on to because it is your favorite thing. My favorite thing here had been the canvas, and in a moment of clarity I realized that if I got rid of the canvas I'd be left with an empty easel, a much more powerful and poignant way of expressing the painter's sense of creative emptiness.

Besides, an easel might become a kind of skeletal structure that the painter could hold onto in some emotionally charged way and through which we could see him - as though looking at a man through prison bars.

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This small pencil sketch gave me the basic idea. Now, I had to create a real ambience for the elements in the image and had to make some decisions about the figure himself. Heat, light and a certain mood of exhaustion were in my head as I started my color sketch. I imagined the painter hanging onto the easel almost as though he needed it for support. He would be bare-chested to emphasize the tropical heat of the Mexican locale and also to suggest his state of vulnerability. I imagined the light flooding in from an open door behind this tableau of artist and easel.

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As the little painting developed, I made the easel quite dark as a kind of anchor for the whole image and as a strong centered shape through which we see the artist posed slightly off-center and with his face partly obscured. I made the edges of the doorway soft and indeterminate to give more sense of the light pouring in and also to let the hard shape of the easel dominate. I added a canvas leaning on the floor and a table with art supplies. I decided on very straightforward lettering that slightly disappeared as the letters crossed into the darker areas, perhaps suggesting the idea of the "unknown."

I was satisfied enough with this sketch to show it to Bernard Gersten, the executive producer of Lincoln Center Theater, and he and his creative team agreed that the concept worked and that I should proceed with the finished art.

Because I work on the poster many weeks before play rehearsals start, the actors are often not available for me to photograph as research. Pre-existing photographs of the actors or head shots are useless to me since my images depend entirely on the nuances of the gesture I am imagining, so I don't do portraits of actors unless I can photograph them myself. Lincoln Center Theater is usually satisfied to have the character in the poster portrayed as a type rather than a specific actor, so I went ahead and persuaded a good friend, Mirko Ilic, to pose as the painter. He is considerably younger than both the character in the play and Donald Sutherland, but I was fairly sure that Mirko could give me the information I needed for my painting.

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I did five fairly elaborate paintings, partly because the light effect in the background wash had to be done quickly and didn't turn out quite right, or the figure became overworked. But I also kept painting because the image really intrigued me and I wanted to do it again and again to see what else would happen. Below are two of these preliminary paintings, one in which the figure looks too young and one in which I went overboard with the wrinkles.

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Finally, I produced a version I liked. It had the sense of light I wanted and the figure looked haggard yet interesting in the right way. I did lettering that was not quite as simple as my original sketch but that suited the density of this particular painting. I sent it over to the theater.

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By this time, however, I had used up four weeks and the play was in rehearsal, so the reaction to my art became colored by the fact that the star was on the premises. For the producers, it was now paramount that my poster show a likeness of Donald Sutherland. Whatever disappointment I felt about my art being rejected was balanced by the great opportunity of photographing Sutherland and then making a poster out of those shots.

I took the easel over to the theater and showed Sutherland my sketch. He said that he understood my idea and would give me a couple of variations. His variations were so full of a great actor's physical imagination and sense of what his face and body could project that I knew, watching his changes through my camera's viewfinder, that he was giving me the basis for a whole new kind of image. In place of the somewhat generalized melancholy of the figure in my sketch he was giving me a specific man, a heroic figure saddened by circumstance.

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As I did the sketch on the left, I became convinced that it wasn't the pose I should use - Sutherland seemed almost too concealed by the easel. In the right-hand sketch, parts of his figure emerge in an intriguing way from behind the easel and the angles of his arms contrast with the straightness of the easel frame. The composition needed an element in the foreground, so I added the corner of a table and a can of brushes. Also in this sketch, I conceived the beginnings of my idea for the type, which was to play the lettering against and around the easel.

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In this study I am still hanging on to the background idea and the general color mood from my previous sketches, but allowing the easel to touch the top edge of the poster rectangle gave me the idea of a tighter, flatter composition that would be much more designed to its borders. Also, because the easel is lighter here, I saw how interesting the shape of the black pants became. Even though the effect of this watercolor is too gloomy and graphically too even-toned, it was a necessary step in moving me from the first idea of the poster into the possibilities that the Donald Sutherland photographs had opened up.

There was a big jump in my thinking at this point. I realized that the light atmosphere that I had hung onto through all the previous versions was wrong for the information in the new photos. This insight led me to make the basic drawing in a flatter way, forgoing a deeper sense of depth and playing all the shapes as a pattern within the border rectangle. I then painted a simple orange background fading at the bottom to a darker hue. Now there was no suggestion of a door or light coming from behind.

At this point I saw that leaving the shirt white was a dramatic graphic element. The white shirt and the orange background set up a brighter, higher color key and led me to make the easel much more subtle and to allow the contrasts of the shirt, the pants and the skin tones to dominate the image.

I wasn't bound by the things I had learned from the earlier sketches - this felt like a piece of art that was making its own rules. It was one of those happy experiences where I made the painting in a state of complete focus and in the space of three or four hours. I designed the lettering to continue the game of playing elements against the border and against edges within the composition. When I was finished, I was fairly sure I had created the piece of art that would become the printed poster, and, fortunately, everyone at Lincoln Center Theater agreed.

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The emotional center of the poster was now the face of the painter, because the photographs of Donald Sutherland had given me an intensity and a specificity to work with that was far beyond any way I could have imagined the figure or achieved from using a stand-in.

This column brings to a close this 12-part series. It has been absorbing for me and a great pleasure to write these columns, and to revisit aspects of drawing I haven't thought about analytically for some time and to find new ways to articulate my deep interest in drawing the human figure. I am grateful to all of you who have followed the series. To those of you who have taken the time to have written comments in response to the columns, you have made it incredibly interesting and rewarding for me. Thank you, all.

Strategies to Get You there (11)

In the last column, I demonstrated a way of looking at the figure and seeing the energy that moves from part to part. This makes it possible for us to draw the figure and express its liveliness and psychology, as well as to engage an effective route toward seeing proportion.

Once we tune into these cooperative forces that animate the body, they seem obvious; yet opening up the kind of intuitive intelligence we need in order to see these forces is difficult when we are so used to relying mainly on the simple scanning operations of our eyes. As we draw, we need to record pressures and not just edges, and we need to see relationships between parts rather than just pieces of the body.

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The exercises and ideas in this week's column are designed to move you toward the goal of seeing the energy chain in the body by practicing drawing large forms, and getting used to the idea of moving out in your drawing and not worrying about attaching one thing to another or enclosing the whole shape of the figure. Once you have gotten over your fear of making a mark out in the white space of the paper and a distance away from the last mark you made, it will free your mind to see that significant energy relationships in the body are often not right next to one another.

The first exercise in the video below uses patches of lines to describe the large forms of the pose and the pressures that move throughout the body.

The second drawing in the video shows that, as an artist, you have to be alive to the possibilities of each pose as you encounter it, and be willing to be surprised and to surprise yourself. This also involves seeing the beautiful relationship that often exists between the model's gaze and his or her hands.

The third drawing in the video demonstrates that sometimes, when your reaction to the model's gesture is particularly strong, an urgent, rougher drawing will help you to feed back to yourself the character of the pose. This kind of experience with drawing - overstating what you see - will give you a taste of how the spirit of caricature is an important element of a lot of interesting art.

The fourth drawing in the video shows how important it is to identify the central aspects of a pose in order to give yourself a theme that helps you to organize your thoughts and the order in which you tackle the different parts of the body.

All of these practices will lead you to empathic thinking. What do I imagine the thigh feels like? What do I sense coming from the model's face and gesture? Where does holding that pose probably hurt? What do I find most beautiful? When you can reach out mentally toward the model in this way, your drawing hand will become much more able to mimic the qualities of the forms that you see - you will be able to make the stroke saying to yourself, "It FEELS like THIS!" - rather than simply noting that the stroke is in the correct place. The best drawings of the human figure seize on its life force.

Showing pressure with patches of lines.

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Using the Model's gaze as a clue to the whole pose.

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James McMullan Responding to the spirit of the hands.

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James McMullan Overstating the character of the pose.

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The Energy Chain James McMullan demonstrates how to see relationships between parts rather than just pieces of the body. Video by Drew Beebe on You Tube

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I have been mostly dealing with active poses in this discussion of drawing the figure, so I am including this drawing of a sitting figure, since many of you will want to draw your friends posing in a more comfortable position.

To help you find the vitality in a typical sitting pose, I have diagrammed the energy chain in this example. Because the young woman is supported by the chair she sits on, the strength in her body is used mainly to hold up and balance the elements of the head, the spinal column and the pelvis. The legs are relatively passive but they contribute a bracing element to the overall stability of her body.

It's important when drawing a pose like this to find a clue in the area of the abdomen that implies the support of the chair seat and gives you a sense of how the pelvis is tilted (in a clothed figure the clue is often the ellipse of the belt or the waistband). Those of you who practice yoga or any of the allied exercise disciplines know about the optimal alignment of the head, spine and pelvis. As artists drawing the figure, we are recording all the different ways that individuals meet that standard or deviate from it.

Finally, as an end note to my discussion of drawing the figure, I feel that confidence in being able to evoke the figure realistically gives you the platform for playing aesthetic games that are not so rigorously correct. Your opinions about the body and the model, whether emotional, skeptical, lustful or witty, will finally be the elements that bring meaning to your drawing.

In the two color examples included here, I have drawn the same model quickly and enthusiastically in order to register my strong response to his skinny body and his theatrical sense of movement. He reminded me of a flamenco dancer or a naked Don Quixote.

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The Chain of Energy (10)

In the preceding columns I have introduced you to ways of seeing the particular structural logic of different kinds of subjects - the ellipses within round objects, the strength and/or flexibility built into manufactured objects like shoes or chairs, perspective as a key in seeing space relationships in complex scenes, growing patterns in subjects like flowers and trees, and the cubistic understructure of the human head. Now we are ready to move on to considering how to see and draw the whole human figure. It is the most subtle, challenging and rewarding subject for us as artists.

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In order to observe the nuances of movement in musculature, we will study the nude body. It will give you the foundation for better understanding the clothed figure.

(Note: Because the approach I am introducing you to entails a big change of thinking - a reach for the life force rather than just the surface shadows in drawing the figure - I will present the subject in two columns. In this, the first column, I will explain and demonstrate what one could call the goal of drawing the figure, and in the next I will give you strategies for approaching the goal from different directions. This may seem counter-intuitive, since I am giving you the "steps" last, but because the central idea of this approach is so necessary to all practice of it, the leading-up exercises would mean nothing if you didn't know where you were headed.)

The body, as we know, is a miraculous system of bones, muscles, blood and nerves, and it is possible to study it in purely anatomical terms. We can follow Da Vinci's example and learn as much about the body as any medical student, and it might serve us well as artists, but most of us don't have the inclination for this scientific kind of study nor the stomach for dissection.

We should, of course, have a general grasp of the major bones in the skeleton and the big muscle groups as a basis for drawing the figure. But knowledge of anatomy can take us artists only so far, because studying anatomical illustrations gives us a static view of the body that is difficult to impose on the actual gesture of any model we see before us.

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Fortunately, the body, moving as it does in life, tells us a story that we can learn to read. Because the body is a cooperative totality - every part is engaged, to one degree or another, with any movement that is initiated - we can read this rhythmic dialogue that courses through from the feet to the head and out to the fingertips. It is a chain of energy. We learn to read it by looking at the figure in a more total and empathic way.

Instead of concentrating on details and accumulating our drawing bit by bit, measuring each part as though it were an equal component to every other part, we see in each particular pose that the energy is being used and controlled in a way that is specific to that pose. We can find points of pressure or relationships that make the model's movement come alive for us; each of those points or relationships can become a "big idea" that helps us find a place to start and a theme to pursue as we continue to draw.

Once you tune into this story that the body tells, it will seem like one of those Aha! moments where you say to yourself, "Why didn't I see this before?" Yet getting to that moment is often difficult. Most people have to discard an approach to the figure where they make a "picture" of the model that depends mostly on setting up edges and shading in the interior forms.

The change in thinking that achieves liveliness in drawing involves recognizing that the forces that animate the body are widespread. We have to be prepared to see the pressure in a hip, for instance, being echoed and continued in the pressure on the opposite side of the rib cage and on to the pressure in the opposite side of the neck. It is a much more spatial way of seeing the body than the "containment" method that many artists use. Instead of locking down the forms of the body, the approach I am introducing celebrates how much the forms are moving back and forth in space, and implying, in the moment after our drawing is finished, that the model will move again.

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In the video that follows, you will see me draw a model in two poses and analyze my thinking as I go along. I hope it will introduce you to these ideas about drawing the figure in a way that is clearer than a series of still drawings.

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Figure Drawing
James McMullan demonstrates how to draw the human figure.
Video by Drew Beebe.

I include here some drawings I have done using color in a non-naturalistic way to intuitively register my response to the changes of pressure and direction of forms in the poses I am observing. I hope they will help you to see the possibilities of concentrating on the energy of the figure as the objective of drawing.

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Drawing Funny (9)

The subject of this column is caricature, but I'm not going to explain or demonstrate it myself. When the art god was doling out the syrup of graphic wit, he must have slipped on a banana peel just as he got to my cup and most of it spilled out on the floor. This being the case, I have chosen three artists whose cups of graphic wit truly runneth over and whose work represents caricature at its highest and most droll level of accomplishment.

Two are friends of many years and are literary wits as well as being celebrated artists: Edward Sorel, whose covers for the New Yorker are legendary, and Robert Grossman, whose animated films, comic strips and sculptures are both political and hilarious. The third artist, Tom Bachtell, creates stylish drawings for The New Yorker every week and, memorably, for many months played graphic games with George Bush's eyebrows.

I asked each of the artists to create a caricature of Pablo Picasso and to give us whatever back story on their process that they choose to share. I think the results show that in order to draw funny, it really helps to be able to free-associate with fish, ex-wives and square eyes.

So here's Picasso - three ways.

Edward Sorel

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Robert Grossman

Thought process: Picasso. Intense gaze. Makes sense in his case. One of his gimmicks was to put both eyes on one side of a face, which nature had only ever done in the instance of the flounder. Can I show him as a flounder?

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Refining the flounder concept until I realize I'm the one who's floundering.

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Pablo in Art Heaven glaring down at the puny efforts of mere mortals.

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Tom Bachtell

"I work in brush and ink. I drew the face a dozen times, playing with various brushes, strokes, line weight and other ways of applying the ink. I started to imagine the face on the surface of the paper and chase after it with the brush, trying to capture the squat, vigorous, self-confident poser that I see when I think of Picasso, those black eyes blazing out at the viewer. Since he often broke faces into different, distorted planes I felt free to do that, as well as making his eyes into squares and his nose into a Guernica-like protuberance."

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Plumbing the Head (8)

The human head is potentially the most emotional subject an artist can choose. We spend our lives scanning other people's faces to assess their relationship to us and our feelings towards them. Among the myriad expressions a face can produce we can see friendliness, attractiveness, intelligence, wariness, hostility or aggression, and we tend to credit this expressiveness mostly to the eyes and the mouth. As artists, however, we can draw the head to reveal that its personality comes not just from the features but from the character of all its forms, and from how the eyes, the nose and the mouth are sculpturally embedded in the terrain of the whole head.

To help us get past the idea of the face as a kind of flattish mask sitting in front of a vague bulbous form with ears, we need first to accentuate its spatial ins and outs in a diagrammatic drawing. This gives us a chance to really enjoy how much each of us has a particular nose jutting out at a particular angle, a particular setback from our brow to our eyes, a particular mound of muscles surrounding our mouths, particular rolling fields in our cheeks, a particular thrust to our chin and a particular mass in the shape of the back of our head.

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I show here a diagrammatic drawing and a more realistic drawing of a model to demonstrate, in a two-step procedure, the possibility of simplifying the forms in a study to prepare us for doing a more naturalistic portrait.

In the first drawing, I have emphasized the steep projection of the sides of the nose from the plane of the cheek and the nose's angle relative to the slope of the forehead, the deep setback of the eyes from the brow, the angular planes of the cheek moving down to the forward-projecting muscles around the mouth and the strong, jutting chin. Another important aspect of the drawing is that it describes the narrow depth of the back of the head and thus determines the overall proportion of this man's skull.

As you can see by comparing the two drawings, much of the personality of the man's head was captured in the basic shapes of the diagrammatic version, even before the more subtle details of the eyes and mouth were added in the second drawing.

Below are four more examples of diagrammatic and realistic head drawings.

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In the video included here, I draw two models and, as I am doing it, I explain my responses to the character of their heads.

The Character of the Head

James McMullan demonstrates how he draws the shapes of faces. Video by Drew Beebe.

The analysis of John's head became an instinctive part of my observation as I did this oil portrait of him.

The Three Amigos (7)

There is something particularly satisfying about setting up objects for a still life painting. It's like a little world that you control. First you get to choose the inhabitants - maybe a vase, some flowers, a weird gourd, a plastic Mickey Mouse, your baby shoes - and then you get to move them around like a potentate.

Of course, this opportunity to combine a mélange of objects can lead to a too-complicated visual mess. There are a few fundamental decisions to make before you start a still life: deciding on how many elements to include, how to arrange them so that they overlap in a good way and how to position the objects to create not only a satisfying aggregate shape, but also ensure that the negative space is interesting.

© The Estate of Alice Neel, Courtesy David Zwirner, New York
Alice Neel's "Symbols (Doll and Apple)," c.1933

Paul Cézanne

We have many models in the history of art to help us think about still lifes. Cezanne and his apples immediately leaps to mind. His art, like the painting I include here, demonstrates how to build a complex but harmonious arrangement. Thinking of still lifes that are a bit more quirky, I show an early painting by Alice Neel that is full of strange psychological emanations. Some contemporary artists, like Wayne Thiebaud , arrange their objects in grid-like patterns. This style of echoing modern mass production dispenses with the old idea of compositional charm altogether.

Many artists have chosen to paint still lifes simply to represent some idea of beauty rather than to make any particular narrative point, yet even the most "neutral" painting of apples or roses tends to suggest the abundance of life or its transitory nature. Too, the relationship of objects in a still life almost inevitably brings to mind the relative status or kind of connection that the objects have with one another.

The doll at the center of Neel's painting dominates the apples and the glove, whereas the three apples in the bowl in the Cezanne seem protected by both the bowl and the drapery, and guarded by the two outlying apples. I may be making more of a point about the implications that arise out of still lifes than perhaps Cezanne or the other artists ever intended, but I do it to show that the choice and arrangement of objects in a still life is less neutral and more interesting than you might have expected.

Although I am specifically dealing with the idea of a simple still life here, the issues of the relative scale of elements, what goes in the foreground or the background, the rhythm of shapes and the effect of light and shade would be as pertinent to a composition of figures in an interior or a landscape, in fact any kind of complex image you can imagine.

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I have chosen three objects: a dark glass vase, a bowl with apples and a cream pitcher. I will paint these objects in five different arrangements to show how the objects can overlap each other gracefully and how each arrangement affects the proportions of the picture, the negative space and the character of the objects' relationships.

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In the photograph of the objects the vase is in the center, and even though the effect is of a school lineup, the vase is definitely the tall student in the class, and, despite the curves, possibly a bully or a mean girl. The arrangement is satisfyingly symmetrical and the rectangle of the picture is spacious enough to hold the three elements comfortably. In the painting just above, I have moved the vase to the left, possibly the head of the school line, and made some adjustments to the picture. I moved the white cloth that the objects sit on so that it cuts the foreground at an angle, roughly echoing the angle of the slant of light in the background. This balances the optical heaviness of the vase on the left, and enlivens the negative space in the picture. In these exercises I am making these paintings in very limited, almost monochromatic color, to keep the emphasis on the composition.

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I now move the pitcher slightly forward. The group starts to feel more integrated - as though they have started some kind of dialogue. I include the line drawing that was scanned at an early stage of the art to show both my adjustments to the drawing and to the rectangle of the picture. I have also highlighted the significant intersection of this composition - the place where the pitcher overlaps with the fruit bowl. It was important to move the pitcher enough in front of the bowl so that the curve at the bottom of the bowl didn't start to ride up the front edge of the jug. I also made sure that the spout of the pitcher was above the rim of the bowl to make a visually satisfying relationship between the ellipse of the bowl and the hooked shape of the spout.

The general rule about overlaps is that they should clearly move one shape in front of the other and should avoid two shapes, particularly curves, just touching each other. In the painting's background, I darken the area at the right to help balance vase on the left, and I adjust the white cloth to allow a little of the table edge to show along the bottom. That dark bar visually stabilizes the composition. The shadows cast by the objects help to connect them and to bring a sense of light atmosphere into the image.

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I scanned the line drawing at a moment when I was using the space relationship between the spout of the pitcher and the curve of the vase to judge the position of the pitcher. This was a clearer point to me than using the base of the pitcher to figure out where it sits in the field. I adjusted the rectangle after I realized that I needed more space on the left to match the space on the right. In the painting, the shadow cast by the vase on the back wall becomes a significant factor in the feeling of the whole picture. It both dramatizes the top lip of the jug and it further separates the jug from its companions. Now the jug poses a question and one apple leans forward skeptically. The vase is mute.

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Uh, oh! Poor juggy had too much heavy cream at the party last night and he's not feeling tip-top. Artist James is also having a little trouble with the proportions of the rectangle, but after four tries he gets it right.

In the intersection of the jug and vase it was important that the curve of the spout clear the base of the vase. It creates a little negative shape that is more interesting than having the two ellipses pile on top of one another as they would have been if the jug had been higher in the composition. Comparing the drawing with the painting you can see how much the tone of the back wall and the cast shadows help to pull the elements together.

Another reasonable alternative to this formation would have been to have the jug lower down, clearing the shape of the vase altogether.

I hope this will encourage you to choose three relatively simple objects and try some different compositions. It will give you practice in drawing objects and getting a feel for how one particular relationship of shapes can feel wrong, and yet one that's only slightly different can feel right, right, right!

The fact that the rectangles I drew in these exercises were not accurate, or that I had to change them as I proceeded, does not take away from their usefulness in my mental process. Drawing the rectangle free-hand as a first step makes it come alive in my thinking in a way that simply accepting the edges of a drawing pad as my "field" would not. That first movement of my pencil or brush to choose those four edges as the space in which I will make my future choices is as much a part of my drawing as all the other lines I will make.

I suggest that in making compositional sketches you draw a rectangle on your pad as a beginning step, rather than always planning your composition using the full area of the pad. You might want to consider a bigger pad than you usually use to give you more possibilities in the shapes that you can draw.

In the next column I will investigate how to analyze the forms in drawing heads.

The Shadow Knows (6)

Probably the first thing we notice when we observe an object is its shape. This is an enormously useful characteristic because it gives us an immediate impression of the spirit of the subject.

Think of the shape of an elephant. Its mass and tree-trunk-like legs suggest the slow, unstoppable movement of the animal. Contrast this with the shape of a grasshopper, whose delicate antennae and jutting-back legs suggest a more nervous, fast kind of energy. Responding to shape is the first step in our logical and intuitive search for the meaning of what we draw.

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If responding to shape is a fundamental aspect of seeing an object, it also interacts with all our other perceptual responses in helping us make sense of our subjects. When one is actively observing a subject in order to draw it, the mind is ping-ponging among different visual responses, shape-to-color-to-contour-to-shadow-to-proportion, and from those purely "eyeball" calculations to all the memory and psychological associations we have about our subject.

This ability of the mind to intermingle all our different kinds of reactions enriches our response and strengthens each part of that response. Shape is made more meaningful by seeing color and volume, and particularly by our recognition of our subject's "thingness" - what makes an elephant an elephant, for instance. Understanding the significance of each part of a shape - seeing that the bump behind an elephant's head is where the strength of the shoulder reveals itself and is different in nature from the soft curve of the belly - helps us to draw lines that evoke various kinds of energy. This is in contrast to making a contour line that moves around a shape as though each part is equal, like a neutral diagram. What we want from each stage of the drawing is to try to answer more and more of the question, "How is this thing different from every other thing?"

I include a watercolor drawing of a tap dancer to show how the silhouette of a figure can convey a particular vitality better than the details themselves.

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In the process of drawing a shoe and a chair, I will show you how you can see their shapes as part of your response to their functions, and as the beginning of a much richer mental game than contour alone. You can either draw the shoe and chair from the photos or find a shoe and chair of your own to draw, following my steps.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

I begin by thinking about how I put on a shoe and how I walk in it. In the drawing I made over the shape of the shoe (at right), I emphasize the aperture that the foot uses to get into the shoe, the embracing forms of the instep, the heel and the toe, the point at which the ball of the foot hits the ground and the flexible area on top that gets wrinkled by the constant bending of the material. At this stage I am ignoring all the logos and surface designs so that I can concentrate on the fundamental issues of how the shoe is made to accommodate the foot and its function. In this way, I have enlivened the shape of the shoe in my mind so that different parts have different qualities and it is no longer like the map of a country I have never visited. This analysis (which you can make by simply thinking about the shoe and without diagramming it) will guide me in making a more detailed drawing of the shoe.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

As I start, I am still thinking about the large enclosing areas that I emphasized on the silhouette shape. I first make the bottom line of the sole where the pressure of the ball of the foot is exerted - it feels to me like a basic aspect of the "walking" function of the shoe. Then I make lines that enclose the heel, toe and instep, and a looping line that begins to describe the aperture of the shoe. Even though these lines form a kind of contour, I have tried to make each of them express the particular kind of pressure and implicit volume I feel in that area. This is in contrast to a contour line that simply describes an edge by moving evenly around the shape.

These first lines are especially important because, just as in the drawing of the lily , I am choosing among the myriad details I am seeing to find the issues that seem particularly central to the function of the shoe and, in that way, I take charge of the drawing.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

Now I make volumetric lines around the heel and below the instep to establish the larger forms of the shoe. I add more detail to the aperture and the laces. As much as possible, I try to use the design details to reinforce the three-dimensionality of the shoe, even trying to imagine what zoomy, wrap-the-foot feelings the designer had when he decided to make these particular shapes. As I draw, I see that I have slightly missed the chunky proportions of the sneaker, so I make correctional lines around the top lining to make that part higher. A drawing should feel like a live, open-ended experience in which you can amend your lines as you absorb more and more of your subject.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

This is the finishing stage of the drawing, and I concentrate on strengthening the roundedness of the forms, adding more volumetric lines around the area at the ball of the foot, heel and toe. I add darks to the surface the shoe sits on to give it more spatial presence and to set off the white color of the material. As I draw the designs on the surface I hold back slightly on their darkness so that the graphic elements won't overwhelm the sense of form in the whole shoe. This lack of logo enthusiasm on my part helps the drawing to maintain it's unity, but it probably won't lead to any phone calls asking me to do product illustration.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

The happy guy at ease in the furry chair represents the beginning of my thinking about drawing the chair. I let the idea of sitting register strongly in my mind as I look at the chair - I can imagine what the seat and the back feel like as I sit, and remember the trust I put in chair legs to do their job stoutly and not collapse. I think of soft chairs and hard chairs and put this particular chair in the medium- hard category. The design of the chair slots into 1940's English no-nonsense with some mild Art Deco around the slats. A likable bourgeois seat from which to eat your soft-boiled eggs. This little common-sense exercise helps me to see the chair as both a chair-chair as well as a specific chair, anything but a neutral shape. The lines I have drawn over the chair silhouette emphasize these core functions of sitting and support.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

I start the drawing by making the rectangle of the seat, then the line describing one side of the back and the connecting leg. Next I draw two lines delineating the near front leg. Now I have implicitly set up the position of all four legs. As you see from my red lines, the rectangle on the floor is anchored by the two legs I have drawn and echoes the rectangle of the seat. My basic sense of perspective helps me to draw the lines so that the elements recede. Part of the satisfaction of starting the drawing in this way, is that it's like the answer to a puzzle - how do I figure out in the most efficient way where the ends of the legs are?

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

Once the positions of the various rectangles that comprise the chair are pinned down, it becomes a matter of adding the details so they are both where they should be and they also retain the character of this specific chair. As I draw the legs, for instance, I think about the difference between the edge of a sawn wooden piece and the same part of a chair if it were made from an extruded steel pipe. They are both straight, but the wood has a certain softness in it's straightness that the steel would not.

It may seem odd to think about different kinds of straightness, but a sensitivity to the materials that an object is made from is one of the things that I believe experience in drawing will lead you to. In the final stage of the drawing I use cross-hatch shading to bring out the sturdiness of the chair and the flatness of the seat - the qualities of structure and "sittingness" with which I began.

Learning to understand the structure of a shoe or a chair and be able to draw it in a straightforward manner gives you the basis to consider those objects (or any others) in a more personal and intuitive way. These two paintings by Van Gogh resonate with the memories and associations that this pair of boots and this chair had for him in his life.

Vincent van Gogh A Pair of Shoes, 1886

Vincent van Gogh Van Gogh's Chair, 1888