One of the best ways - if not THE best way - to learn to draw is by doing it from life. I can hear my hapless workshop participants groaning right now, since I have so much fun getting out the cattle-prod and making everyone do gesture sketches from a constantly-moving cougar or raccoon kit or whatever.
If you ask my opinion (not that anyone did), a lack of drawing ability prohibits many artists from realizing their vision effectively and fully. Once you know how to draw, and know the anatomy of a given critter, you know what liberties you can take, and to what effect. Bob Kuhn said that he would tweak aspects of his subject to make it look like what we think it ought to look like.
Or consider Picasso. The work he painted in his teen years was beautifully represented; the man knew how to draw…and then spent the rest of his life going beyond just representing his subjects - he got inside of them, took them apart, twisted them around, to get at other aspects of them.
But back to our topic. This sketch is of my German Shepherd girl, Suka, sleeping on the couch next to me. When a critter is awake and moving, the best I can do is gesture sketches; repose offers a better chance to observe details and proportions. So I have a LOT of drawings of Suka sleeping. I once watched Bob Kuhn sketching a lynx from life; the cat was not moving much, but it certainly wasn’t holding still. Bob developed one particular pose, adding to it when he could as the cat moved about; meanwhile, I was scribbling away doing 40 zillion bits of gesture. Bob’s was a helluva lot nicer. Duh.
So this is everyone’s challenge in the next week: get a sketchbook, a charcoal, and a critter, and go to it. I’ll be flogging my summer workshop with the same thing. We’ll all suffer together.
Tags: Drawing, growth, life drawing
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June 20th, 2008 at 8:52 am
These are really nice Julie, great shapes and they retain volume. Everything you say about drawing from life is so true. One can never really be free to create unless they can draw well and understand the subject matter from the inside out. In fact to pull off dynamic action of animals well requires a solid foundation of drawing from not only life, but from your imagination. And also, many people want to paint alla prima with more athletic brushwork, but don’t realize that being able to draw well is what makes this a reality because its an extension of drawing. This is what made Sargent, Sorolla, and so many top alla prima painters amazing, the ability to draw from life. Of course they also stated (or at least Sargent did) that drawing is painting and painting is drawing, there is no difference if its a piece of charcoal or a paint brush. I don’t think a lot of wildlife painters (at least those doing photo realism) spend long hours at crowded zoos drawing and learning their subjects. If they did, there would be some fresher and more unique art out there.
June 20th, 2008 at 11:01 am
I think it’s a little presumptuous to think that only the people who can draw from life can “create.”
it takes me a long time to get drawings the way I want them (not the way other people want them, the way I want them) and i readily admit I use the “scratch and erase” method.
But as far as i am concerned, what is important is whether it looks right in the end (whether the proportions are right, etc), not whether you were able to do it on the fly.
I think that’s true with just about everything in life, actually. Speed is vastly overrated (unless you happen to be and Indy racer, of course)
There: bet that will stir up some lively debate!
June 20th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Mmm, I think Joe said “one can’t be free to create unless one can draw well and know the subject matter”…didn’t see an implication that one must draw from LIFE to create.
What I didn’t talk about in the original post is that drawing from life teaches you about foreshortening, perspective, and so on in a way that photos don’t. Most camera lenses introduce distortion in some fashion (eg, wide-angle lenses create extreme foreshortening, telephoto lenses compress everything and make it the same size, etc). I’ve done drawings of Suka on the couch right next to me where there is quite noticeable foreshortening - very educational!
Larry, I agree that the end result is what’s important, regardless of speed in rendering. However, there’s a certain virtuosity I adore that comes with lots of practice on live subjects.
June 20th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
I’m just saying that having good drawing ability (which can and usually does come from a lot of life drawing) gives you creative freedom. Because you don’t need to guess so much when you are painting “and” you can concentrate on the difficulties of color, value, and edges more when your not struggling with the drawing (proportions, anatomy and design).
I agree that the end result is important, most definitely. But the end results will look different from an artist who does a lot of life drawing and one who doesn’t. Both can be beautiful.
June 21st, 2008 at 5:09 pm
IMHO, given that one is attempting representational subject matter, there is no substitute for drawing from life since photographs flatten and distort. This is particularly true for us animal artists who do wildlife since we are going to end up using photos for our studio paintings no matter how many zoos or game ranches we go to. Ditto doing at least some plein air to help understand how to paint the habitat. I don’t do nearly enough of that, I’m afraid.
Drawing from life teaches you how to compensate and correct as needed and keeps you seeing “in the round”. It’s also how you train your eye to know what “right” is. I know that that sure changed for me from when I was just trying to draw from photos on my own and when I finally got three years of traditional drawing instruction at the Academy of Art University. I look back at my pre-art school drawings and I could go on for a long paragraph about all the things I never saw back then. And worse, had no idea that I didn’t see.
From what I have seen over the years, a drawing done quickly, with knowledge and competence, has an energy and freshness that is very often (but not always) lacking in more deliberate work. You could say the same thing about small preliminary color studies too. There are a lot of illustrators who would far rather have one of Norman Rockwell’s color studies than one of his finishes for precisely that reason. They have a special dash and sparkle.
Some of my recent live animal pen and ink sketches from the Denver Zoo are on my blog, along with some finished drawings for notecards, but I’ll try to be a good girl and do my homework this next week and post the result
Maybe I’ll take a swing at the kittens I’m fostering for the next month or so. They have to slow down or rest sometime. I think.
June 24th, 2008 at 7:59 am
Well, guess I’ll chime in. I do think that drawing is of prime importance to the artist. I dont think anyone is saying that each piece must be paintstakingly drawn out, then colored in. Some pieces need more drawing than others and it depends on the intent at the time. For the landscape artist, like myself, drawing is important, but no so much as for you wildlife folks. When I paint a tree, it doesnt really need to look like THAT tree, unless it’s a landmark or something. Conversely, if I paint Pike’s Peak and it doesnt look like Pike’s Peak, people will notice.
What I think drawing does for the artist, is to inform the mind. As I take time to draw a thing, I learn more about the way it’s made- the bark of different trees or the way leaves cluster on branches, characteristics of the shoreline along slow or fast moving water, the way groups of petunias stand, or geraniums, or peonies, and so on. As I paint with knives, much of this doesnt come into play like it would with brushwork, but it still informs my work and, I think at least, makes it better than it might otherwise be.
July 1st, 2008 at 10:30 am
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