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.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

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.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

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.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

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.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

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.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

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.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

 

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.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

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

Mother Nature Decoded (5)

Mother Nature can look very chaotic. When we take a walk around a garden, every flowering bush can seem like a confusing explosion of blossoms and leaves, every tree like an impossibly complicated tangle of branches and foliage. How can we possibly draw these verdantly overflowing subjects without going blind, or crazy?

Well, the truth is that drawing or painting the actual complexity of a bouquet of flowers or a patch of forest with precision is a high-level observational and aesthetic task that, for the moment, we will leave to artists like Henri Fantin-Latour or Gustav Klimt. We can, however, take a single stem from that bouquet and choose single trees from that forest to look at and find a way to draw.

Henri Fantin-Latour, left. "Roses"
Gustav Klimt, right. "The Birch Wood"

Many people learning to draw have an understandable anxiety about getting the proportions right. The skill of drawing proportionally comes from doing a lot of drawing, but also from combining the search for correct proportion with the all the other ways that we think about our subject as we draw. In the following analysis of a flower I think you will see that responding to fundamental issues in looking at the flower help us to draw the proportions of the plant much more easily than concentrating on each part of the plant as we come to it.

James McMullan

A good place to start is to acknowledge that this lily is a growing plant moving upwards to get nourishment from the sun and rain, and that its central stalk is a strong column that supports the out-springing stems, leaves and flowers.

In the first stage of the drawing I establish the direction of the stems and leaves and the centers of the petals as they bend away from their core. Two things strike me as I make these lines - one, that the curves of the stems and leaves have a rhythmic relationship with one another and two, that the petals form an almost symmetrical "fountain" as they burst from their center.

In choosing to start my drawing in this way I have decided on a priority - that establishing the basic growing direction of each of the elements gives me a more coherent foundation on which to build my drawing than starting with any particular detail. This is an enormously important insight in drawing - if you start each observation of a subject by deciding what is most important to its character, you will know where to begin your drawing and how to proceed. In the case of the pot you drew, its series of ellipses stacked on a central core was the key to its structure. In this lily you are considering something much more organic and subtle, but still with a logical structure.

James McMullan

In stage two of the drawing, using the first lines as a guide as to where the centers are, I choose to finish the two petals on the far side of the flower because they are the easiest to understand and give me more reference points to complete the other petals. Again, using the first lines as a guide to where the center of the leaves are, I draw the twisting forms of the leaves, registering what is the underside or the top side of the leaf.

James McMullan

In stage three of the drawing I have established enough of the architecture of the plant to draw the details - the thicknesses of the various parts of the stalk and stems, the stamens inside the flower and the unopened buds. At this point I could keep working on all the other aspects of shadow and atmosphere, but you could do that without me. I've walked you through the important part of the initial thinking where you might have been led astray by details.

Photo A

Photo B

James McMullan

Trees, with their hundreds of thousands of leaves and branches reaching every which way, are daunting subjects to draw. But just as we thought about the growing pattern of the lily to help us organize the details in our drawing, we can observe in each individual tree clues as to what makes them look like they do.

One of the most useful clues is the leaf of the tree itself, because examining it gives us a sense of the large shape of the tree and the kind of texture that the limbs and groups of leaves create. I have chosen two trees from the yard around my house to consider and to draw. They are both Japanese maples, one an unusual coral bark maple (Photo A), the second a more common split leaf red maple (Photo B). In the close-up photos of the leaves, you will see that the leaves of the coral bark are slightly pointier and thrust outwards more than the leaves of the red maple, which are softer-looking and curl downwards.

The different character of the leaves helps us to understand the overall shape and texture of each tree. The coral bark's silhouette is spiky, with large indentations in its mass, echoing the vigorous pushing-outward energy of the leaves and the deep spaces between each of the leaves' five segments. The feeling of the whole red maple is softer and rounder with fewer big gaps in its perimeter, just like the broader, downward-curling leaf.

James McMullan

Start your drawings by sketching out the large shapes, quickly giving the tree the general character of spikiness (in the case of the coral bark) or roundness and softness (in the case of the red maple). As you proceed to map out the big masses of leaves, keep using the appropriate kind of line, jagged and up-thrusting for the coral bark, and round and downward-arcing for the red maple. The coral bark's leaves feel like they are arranged along the outer branches to form long, spear-like protrusions, whereas the red maple's leaves feel like soft, rounded clumps.

Rather than trying to draw individual leaves, use the characteristic spiky or rounded line to evoke the whole texture of the tree. You are drawing the overall character of the tree, not a rendering for a horticultural textbook. Even when you use groups of lines to quickly develop large shadow areas, keep thinking of the kind of edges and shapes that you see in that particular tree. The red maple, for instance, has a kind of fussiness that you could reflect by using lines that jig and jag around and that have a sense of downward-pointedness. The coral bark's shadow areas can be developed with patches of angular lines that move upward and outward.

Drawing the lily was a more precise observational exercise because we could look at a relatively simple subject up close. The tree drawings were a way to generalize the central character of a more complex and larger subject that we were observing from more of a distance.

However, with enough patience, and finding a tree you love to observe, it is quite possible to do a "portrait" of a particular tree, and I encourage you to find that special tree and to have the experience of drawing it with concentration and particularity. Mother nature may often seem impossibly chaotic, but sometimes she can be pinned down. I include here a drawing of a tree that attracted me in its wintry starkness.

James McMullan

The Beagle Vanishes (4)

In the second column we freed the circle from being a flat-on geometric shape so that it could move out into space as the ellipse. We've used it to help us draw a pot and to see the roundness of forms, and now we're going to use that ellipse to fly us into an imaginary scene that introduces us to the principles of perspective.

We follow that flying Frisbee of an ellipse as it settles down as a perfect little pond on a vast Kansas prairie. A man walks out onto that plain with a picnic basket, a blanket and a beagle. He sits down on his blanket to admire the view and the improbably perfect pond.

James McMullan

The beagle catches the scent of the little rabbit on the other side of the pond and takes off after it. Ignoring the shouts of his master, the dog paddles through the pond, bounds across the vast expanse and disappears over the horizon. (Two nice farmers in the next town find him and call the ASPCA.)

James McMullan

The runaway beagle's trajectory has given us a vanishing point, the first element in the geometry of perspective: the point on the horizon towards which objects in the picture converge. In the first drawing, the man is sitting down so his viewpoint is low (and let's imagine that we're in a slightly elevated position behind him), and because the horizon line occurs roughly at eye level, the horizon line is also low and all the shapes appear relatively flattened out. Also, in one point perspective, all the lines running from left to right are parallel to the horizon line.

In the second diagram, where the man stands up to call his dog, he sees the scene from a higher viewpoint and thus the horizon line is also higher within the rectangle of our image. Now the blanket and the pool become wider, front to back, as does the perceived distance between the man's feet and the horizon. It's just as the ellipses in the drawing of the pot became wider in the same way the more we looked down on them.

As useful as one-point perspective is in drawing a Kansas picnic or highways in the Nevada dessert leading straight to the sunset, other scenes require more complicated angles. For these images we need two-point perspective.

Let's start by going back to the circle and plotting it in two-point perspective so we know how to make an official ellipse. It may not be as fluid or interesting as your free-hand ellipse, but you should know how to do it so you can move on with your life.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

Get Giotto to draw you a circle. Or use a compass or trace around a glass. Then, with T square and ruler, draw a box around the circle. Draw a horizon line above the box. Now draw a vertical line through the middle of the box up to the horizon line (A). Draw another line bisecting the box horizontally (B). Then draw two lines from corner to corner to bisect the box diagonally. Now draw two more vertical lines through the points where the diagonals bisect the circle (C and D). This will give you four intersection points, E, F, G and H, around the circumference of the circle.

Are you still with me? Now, something a little easier to do. Choose two vanishing points, left and right (J and I), along the horizon and roughly equidistant from the center. Now draw lines from the right vanishing point (I) to the top corners of the box and to the intersection points C, A and D. Count the lines you have just made - there should be five.

Now, by drawing a line from vanishing point J to the right corner of the box, we are crossing four lines (check the diagram) that give us important intersections. The first is intersection K , the point at which you can make a horizontal line to complete the perspective square. Think of it as a flap bending away from the bottom box. I'll get to the second intersection in a minute. The third is intersection L, which shows you where to make another horizontal line to establish the center of the perspective box, and marking both left and right intersections "point B" to match how they are identified in the lower box.

The second and fourth intersections, E and H, along with intersections G, F, B and A, match the same points in the lower box and give you the theoretical means to draw a circle seen in perspective. The theory is that you simply connect these eight points (A and B are doubled) with curved lines and, voila, you have the correct ellipse. However, I find it takes a certain amount of fiddling to swing these curves around the corners to make them look right. In other words, you already have to have some sense of what a perspective circle looks like in order to carry out this last bit of the procedure. Whew! Work on your free-hand ellipses.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

Now, back to our Kansas prairie picnic. This time, we'll let our beagle run off at an angle, which will give us a vanishing point, A, to the right of our picture frame. Establish the left-hand vanishing point, B, along the horizon at roughly the same distance from the center as the first vanishing point (as you did in plotting the perspective circle). Choose a point in the lower left of the picture frame along the angle of the first vanishing point for the corner of the blanket, (C). Now join that point to the second vanishing point. This gives you the angles of two sides of the blanket. Now choose two points that seem reasonable for the width (D), and length (E), of the blanket and join those points to the appropriate vanishing points. Now you have completed the perspective view of the rectangle of the blanket as it has turned to match the trajectory of the beagle's flight.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

Since we've spent so much time plotting the circle in perspective (a.k.a. the ellipse), let's turn our pond into a little house on the prairie to get some practice with rectilinear shapes.

First, choose a point (F) above and to the right of the blanket for the near corner of the house (as you did with the blanket), and extend lines along the vanishing point angles to establish the length (H) and width (G) of the house. From the point F draw a vertical line to establish the height (I) of the house.

Using the vanishing point trajectories you can now complete the basic box of the house. In order to establish the center points of the two visible walls, make a horizontal base line, J to K, running through point F at the corner of the house. Using lines running from both vanishing points and through the corners of the house establish the width and length along the base line, J to K. Measure the halfway points along that line. By extending vanishing point lines back to the house from the two midpoints you can figure out where to put the centered roof peak and the centered door, and where to center windows in the remaining spaces. You have now completed a scene of a blanket and a house viewed from the same vantage point

My personal take on perspective is that one should understand enough of the basic idea of vanishing points to substantiate how you see objects and buildings recede in space in your everyday life, so that it helps you to draw a convincing image without having to do a lot of plotting. An easy little exercise you can do is to draw a rectangle with a horizon line and then, free-hand, draw a series of boxes aligning with the same one or two vanishing points. It will help you, too, with understanding what things look like when they are low or high in an image field.

James McMullan

For those of you anxious to move deeper into the labyrinth of perspective, I offer this little taste of what you're in for.

CLICK TO ENLARGE	James McMullan

But to see what a great artist can create playing around with very simple perspective, I include this painting, "Melancholy and Mystery of a Street," by Giorgio de Chirico.

© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Giorgio de Chirico's "Melancholy and Mystery of a Street"

Reproduction, including downloading of ARS works is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Hatching the Plot (3)

In the last column, I discussed ellipses and how drawing them involves the fluid, fairly fast movement of the hand, letting your reflexes carry out the kind of rounded shape you intend to make. Now we'll move on to shading the pot that we previously described in simple outline, using curving lines that are like segments of the ellipse.

James McMullan

These are what I think of as "cat stroking" lines - curves that start gently, reach a crescendo of pressure and then fade out at the end. They enclose lines sensuously and are enormously useful in describing all kinds of bulging, rolling, bumpy subjects. In using these curved lines to shade the pot, we will not only describe the shadow but, because the lines curve around the pot, we will be accentuating its actual form. In my example of cross-hatching I show that, in order to avoid a "clotted" effect, the lines are made at different angles. I have drawn my examples in pen and ink to make the images clearer, but you might want to draw in a 2B or 4B pencil.

James McMullan

Now that the pot has been illuminated with a strong directional light, we can study how that light falls on the object, the angles that the shadows make and how to use lines to shade the drawing. Either using the outline drawing you did last week or, drawing the pot again, follow along with these steps to delineate the shadows on the pot.

James McMullan

In the first stage of the drawing, I show that the light is coming from the right and slightly in front of the pot. This means that the basic pattern of shadow on the outside of the pot falls on the left, but the shadow on the inside of the pot is on the right.

James McMullan

Next, in order to show more of the complexity of the light and shadow, I begin to use cross-hatching, lines that go against the direction of my first lines, but that still consider the form of the pot. I notice where light catches on the shoulder of the pot, creating a little arc of illumination that "pushes" the shadow further to the left. I also show how the shadow arcs under the bottom of the pot, describing the way the shape rolls under towards the base. I also note how the light ground on which the pot sits, reflects light back onto the pot, creating a "core" shadow that is darker not at the back edge, where you might expect it, but slightly in from the edge. This reflected light, and the "core" shadow it creates, is a frequent phenomenon in round subjects.

James McMullan

In the last stage of the drawing, I use very pale lines in the light part of the pot on the right to dramatize the very lightest part of the pot on the "shoulder." In other words, I am saving paper white for the one dramatically lit part of the pot. I finish the drawing by shading the shadow on the ground behind the pot, accentuating the flatness of the ground by using straighter parallel lines.

In order to move on to a slightly more complicated subject that still involves ellipses I have photographed a pitcher. Its pouring lip and handle add two elements that will expand your analytic and drawing skills. Either use the pitcher in the photo as a subject or find a similar object to observe in three dimensions and draw, delineating both its basic structure and the effect of light falling on it.

I have made a basic drawing of the pitcher that may help you as a guide in getting started. Note that the axis of the pouring lip and the handle are the same, in other words, they line up. Also note that in my drawing I am using several "feeling out" strokes to get to the bulging sides of the pitcher. I encourage you to do this: to internalize the feeling of roundness as you make the stroke, so as to move beyond the more neutral feeling of simply reproducing the curve.

James McMullan

James McMullan

© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE,
Rome Giorgio Morandi's "Still Life with Five Objects"

This etching is by Giorgio Morandi, one of my favorite artists. As you can see, his style of drawing rounded shapes is not consistent with my demonstration. This dichotomy illustrates an issue pertinent to every example I use from the history of fine art, which is that the examples I give will expand the ideas of the lesson, rather than simply reinforcing the lesson.

For instance, I have demonstrated how to use curved lines in making the drawing of the pot because those kinds of lines help you to feel out the pot's roundness and because the subtlety of making those lines is a way for you to engage the sensuousness of your reflexes. And now I show you a Morandi still life where he uses straight lines to describe round forms. How confusing! The Morandi etching depends for much of its contemplative beauty on the game the artist plays between the implied depth in which the objects exist and the texture of the lines that bring the drawing back to the surface.

When you are learning to draw, it is useful to understand the most obvious methods of achieving form and proportion, but when your idea of what you want to do in your drawing is strong enough, any line, texture or implement can achieve your vision.

The Frisbee of Art (2)

Pope Boniface VIII was looking for a new artist to work on the frescoes in St. Peter's Basilica, so he sent a courtier out into the country to interview artists and collect samples of their work that he could judge. The courtier approached the painter Giotto and asked for a drawing to demonstrate his skill. Instead of a study of angels and saints, which the courtier expected, Giotto took a brush loaded with red paint and drew a perfect circle. The courtier was furious, thinking he had been made a fool of; nonetheless, he took the drawing back to Boniface. The Pope understood the significance of the red circle, and Giotto got the job.

This is often told as the story of the ultimate test of drawing, and I don't dispute that it is very hard to draw a perfect circle. However, I would argue that it is much more useful to be able to draw a circle existing in space, a circle seen turned at various angles as we usually encounter it in the world. We need to be able to draw an ellipse.

James McMullan

The ellipse is the Frisbee of art, the circle freed from its flatness that sails out into imagined space tilting this way and that and ending up on the top of the soup bowl and silver cup in Jean-Baptiste Chardin's still life or, imagine this, on the wheels of the speeding Batmobile.

Jean-Baptiste Chardin The Silver Goblet

© 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS)
New York Mother and Child

Once you tune into ellipses, you will begin to see them everywhere: in art, as in the Chardin painting, or in life, in your morning coffee cup or the table top on which the cup sits. The ellipse is also implicit in every cylindrical form whether or not we see its end exposed (as it would be in a can or a cup or a length of pipe). Just look at the Picasso "Mother and Child." Highlighting the ellipses, as I have done, helps you to understand the basic roundness of those limbs, encouraging you to see and to draw with a volumetric rather than a flat perception of what you are observing. So the ellipse is important because it exists in so many places as an actual shape, and because it is "buried" in so many round forms that we are likely to draw.

The challenge of drawing an ellipse is that it must be done with enough speed to engage the natural "roundingness" of your reflexes. In essence, you are deciding to make a particular shaped ellipse and then letting your hand and wrist move autonomously to accomplish the job. Much of what you are practicing in learning to draw is engaging your fine motor skills in this way, so that the hand moves to do your bidding without a "controlling" space between deciding to make a particular line and the hand moving to do it. Before this kind of almost simultaneous cooperation between your brain and your hand occurs, you will tend to worry the line out in slow incremental steps. In this hand-eye coordination, drawing is an athletic activity that benefits from practice, like golf or tennis. On a page of your drawing pad, make various kinds of ellipses as a warmup for the exercise below. Keep the movement of your hand fluid and relatively fast.

Let's begin by drawing a pot. A few words on perspective are in order before we start. Think of looking at a can of soda on a table in front of you: the implied ellipse at the bottom of the can where it sits on the table is rounder that the ellipse at the top of the can because you are looking down on it more. If it's easier to observe this in a straight-sided drinking glass then use that as an example. This describes the basic idea, illustrated by the diagram below, that as you look down on an ellipse you see more of it than if the ellipse is higher up relative to your eye level.

James McMullan

Start your drawing by looking at the top of the pot and making an ellipse as close as you can to the shape you see. Give it a couple of tries if you need to. Now bring down two outside-edge lines to where the pot bulges out. Add a center line all the way down to where you think the bottom of the pot is. Now add two horizontal lines, one at the bulge point and one a little above the bottom of the pot. These lines will guide you as you make the two ellipses that describe the cylindrical shape of the pot. Make the ellipse at the bulge point a little rounder than the top ellipse. Make the bottom ellipse rounder still. Now, looking at the outside edges at the bottom of the pot, draw connecting curves between the two ellipses, trying to capture the nature of the shapes in the way that the bulge is more pronounced at the top, like shoulders, and then curves inward.

James McMullan

Congratulations! You have now made a basic linear drawing of a pot. I encourage you to strengthen your understanding of analyzing round forms by doing an additional exercise; choose a basically cylindrical object from your surroundings and draw it using ellipses in the same way I have just demonstrated. Because you will be studying an object in three dimensions rather than in a photograph it may be easier to see the ellipses. I have photographed a group of household objects to suggest some of the things that you might consider.

James McMullan

In the next column I'll show the same pot we've just drawn in a more dramatic light to make it easier to understand its volumes, so you can see how the direction the light comes from affects the shadows. You'll have an opportunity to practice the logic and art of shading.

Back to the Phantom Skill (1)

By James McMullan (Source: Artist's website)

 

Drawing, for many people, is that phantom skill they remember having in elementary school, when they drew with great relish and abandon. Crayon and colored pencil drawings of fancy princesses poured out onto the sketchbooks of the girls, while planes and ships, usually aflame, battled it out in the boys' drawings. Occasionally boys drew princesses and girls drew gunboats, but whatever the subject matter, this robust period of drawing tended to wither in most students' lives and, by high school, drawing became the specialized province of those one or two art geeks who provided the cartoons for the yearbook and made the posters for the prom.

The first few columns of this series on drawing that I'm initiating this week will offer a primer on the basic elements of line-making, perspective, structure and proportion, which I hope will begin to rekindle the love of drawing for those readers who left it behind in the 4th grade. Achieving some confidence in drawing objects will get you started in the pleasure of this activity, and give you the basis for moving on to drawing figures.

I also hope, in later installments, to provide insight into the vitality and sensuousness of great drawing so that your next visit to the museum will be both more gratifying and a chance to amaze your companions with your new-found aestheticism.

My method for helping you to draw focuses primarily on two aspects of the skill: first, showing you how to see the structural logic of the object or figure you are drawing, and second, through focused practice, strengthening the link between your eyes and hand so that you are better able to make the drawing marks you intend.

For readers who are familiar with other kinds of drawing instruction that emphasize experimenting with materials, making images with different kinds of pencils, pens and paints, my approach may seem, at first, somewhat stripped down. However, if you try the exercises I describe, I think you will find that they give you the basic thinking and hand skills you need to move on to whatever experimenting with mediums you like.

James McMullan

In the historical and contemporary art I use as examples here, I hope there will be many drawing styles and different drawing and painting materials to inspire you. But, for the exercises in the early columns, I suggest you stick to using a 2B or 4B pencil so that the goal of clarifying your thinking and strengthening your hand-eye coordination doesn't get confused by the difficulties of manipulating pen and ink or any other more complicated drawing tool.

In advising you to begin with these simple materials, pencil and a drawing pad, I am not denying the sensuousness of charcoal or pen-and-ink or paint or any of the myriad implements and colorful fluids with which, like happy children in a mud puddle, we can make images. I'm simply hoping to provide you with a period at the start of your endeavor in which you can focus on learning to see and getting in touch with your drawing hand without the distraction of style or materials.

In every column I will use examples from the history of art to show how certain functions of drawing and approaches to subject matter play out successfully in the work of specific artists. De Chirico's surreal cityscapes will help to dramatize perspective. Edward Hopper's paintings will illuminate how light brings out the solidity of objects and people. Picasso shows us how modeling can emphasize the substance of faces and bodies, while Matisse will be exhibit A in how artists move from realism to stylization in considering the human figure.

James McMullan

My overall goal, apart from helping with specific information, is to communicate the enthusiasm I feel for the immediacy of drawing. It is the activity that most engages an artist's sense of exploration, both visually, as the artist feels out the image, new born, on the drawing surface, and intellectually, as the drawing becomes the bridge between observation or an idea and a graphic fact. In looking at Michelangelo's studies for the Sistine Chapel, for instance, so searching and in-the-moment is the artist's attention to his subject that I often feel the years fall away and there I am, looking over his shoulder as he draws.

I confess that much contemporary drawing disappoints me for its lack of risk and immediacy. It often seems like the product of a too premeditated and too lengthy process of refinement. Part of this may be the influence of the computer and the surface perfection that it achieves so easily; geometrically pure shapes, even textures, clear colors.

Another source of this arid quality may be attributable to the use of photography as a drawing shortcut. Photography as a source for subject matter has opened many amazing possibilities in 20th and 21st century art, but when it is used as a tracing or projecting tool in order to circumvent the difficulties of achieving correct proportion, the resulting art is often static and lifeless.

Drawing is a process of engagement for the artist, a period of both time and struggle that pulls the artist deeply and intensely into his subject and his ideas. Projecting a photograph in order to give you a perfect drawing of your subject has robbed you of all the imperfect yet more interesting drawings you might have made. The recent exhibit of the art of William Kentridge at The Museum of Modern Art in New York was the most powerful expression of the vital possibility in drawing that I have seen for some time, and it made so much other contemporary drawing seem dry and intellectualized.

Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art. © 2010 William Kentridge.
William Kentridge's drawing from Stereoscope 1998-99

During the 12-week period of this column, I will be working on posters for Lincoln Center Theater as well as on a children's book, and I will share with you sketches from those processes if they seem to illuminate an aspect of drawing being discussed. I hope that readers will respond to this column and help to shape and expand its content. I will be only too happy to move into the more arcane aspects of art and drawing if comments indicate interest.