The Drawing Handbook

Frank J. Lohan

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486301754
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Técnicas artísticas

Designed for beginning and amateur artists, this guide to the essentials of drawing features comprehensive, easy-to-follow lessons and more than 500 detailed illustrations. Frank Lohan, a renowned artist and popular instructor, conducts readers through each step of the creative process, from grasping the concepts of perspective and proportion to producing lifelike drawings of a variety of subjects — landscapes, architecture, animals, flowers, and faces.
Step-by-step exercises focus on attaining the fundamentals of composition, visualizing the geometry of the subject, working with perspective, and mastering drawing techniques for both pencil and pen and ink. Each exercise includes gridded outline compositions to help students develop their drawing abilities. Suggestions for the selection and use of tools will assist in achieving professional-quality results.

PART 1
BASICS

Composition

Basic Drawing Tools and Materials

Some Fundamentals

Seeing the Geometry of Things

Drawing Techniques

This part of the handbook shows you some of the principle considerations of good composition; introduces you to the tools of drawing; shows you how to copy, reduce, enlarge, and transfer a composition to your final paper; gives you some simplified perspective hints and other things to consider when completing a drawing; explains how you can turn your works into notepaper easily and inexpensively; shows you how to see the geometric basis for natural forms (an essential capability if you want to do realistic drawings on your own); and illustrates some of the techniques of drawing with both the pen and with the pencil Part 1 ends with two exercises that will give you practice in creating form and texture with the pen and with the pencil You should try these exercises before you go on to Part 2, which covers actual drawing exercises.

1
Composition

About Composition

Unity and Variety in Composition

Drawing Orientation

Dividing the Drawing Space

Triangular Division

The Golden Section Division

Examples from Master Artists

Balance

Eye Movement and S Curves

About Composition

There is no single formula for creating well-composed drawings, just as there is no one technique for drawing realistic-looking trees, rocks, or other landscape elements. Awareness of the principles that are covered in this chapter, however, will make you more sensitive to the ways the space on your sheet or canvas can be divided. The application of some of the methods discussed will contribute to better composition in your work. Technique improvement will continue to come as you draw more and more.

Among other things, composition concerns the divisions of space on your pad or canvas and where in these divisions you place your key forms, your center of interest, and the more significant compositional elements. Placement is not everything, however; the tonal relationship among these elements is of equal importance and is part of what makes a composition “work.”

Any subject matter contains essential, subordinate (less important), and irrelevant features. As an artist you must be concerned with the way placement and tone are used to emphasize the essential and subordinate elements in your rendition of the subject. Irrelevant elements should be eliminated so as not to distract the viewer from the true message of your rendering. Your artistic judgment is called upon when you’re deciding whether an element is relevant to your message. For instance, do you keep or eliminate the television antenna on a farmhouse in a landscape? The answer depends on what you are trying to say. Of course, if your message is about the spoiling by careless persons of the rustic beauty of the land, then you include the television antennas, burger wrappers, used tires, and pop cans. If your message is about the beauty of the scene, then you eliminate those elements. With regard to your picture, you are God! You represent your little universe as you want it to be.

Unity and Variety in Composition

In order to please most critical eyes, a picture (drawing or painting) should have both unity and variety. If a picture is without unity, the viewer gets the impression of a disorganized muddle. If a picture is without variety, the viewer can quickly become bored as his or her eyes scan the picture.

If it has unity, a work’s elements all just seem to “hang together,” related, yet with appropriate significance or subordination of particular elements. Unity is achieved by proper choice of tone, subtle use of line (edges of forms), and overlap of picture elements, among other devices.

Variety is necessary to minimize boredom as the work is being viewed. A pleasing distribution of shapes on the canvas is essential to variety.

Drawing Orientation

Your paper or canvas may be oriented, or positioned, in many different ways. If it is square, it may be oriented upright, or it may be placed in a diamond orientation with opposite corners at the top and the bottom. It may be round or oval; if it is oval, it may be oriented with the long axis vertical or horizontal. Most drawings and paintings are rectangular or square. A vertically oriented rectangle is called a portrait orientation, and a horizontal rectangle is called a landscape orientation (see figure 1-1). Obviously, portrait orientation is not limited to portraits, nor is landscape orientation only for use with landscapes. These are simply names to differentiate between the two orientations of the paper or canvas.

There are some standard sizes used for paper, canvases, and frames, although any size or proportion can be used. (The use of a nonstandard size, however, generally means making or buying a custom-size frame.) The relative proportions of some of the smaller standard sizes are shown in figure 1-2: 3″ X 5″, 5″ X 7″, 8″ X 10″, 9″ X 12″, 11″ X 14″.

Figure 1-1
A Landscape orientation.
B Portrait orientation.

Figure 1-2
Division of some standard-size canvases into two overlapping squares, one from each short end.

Dividing the Drawing Space

There are many mechanisms you can use to divide your picture area. The primary goal is to get variety into the arrangement of the space and thereby create interest for the viewer. Any mechanism or scheme that does this for you is valid. There is no one way that is “proper.” In fact, there are several ways to pleasingly divide the drawing space and determine key locations for important elements in your composition.

Also shown in figure 1-2 is one of the possible ways to divide the surface of a rectangular space—by the use of a square. Although these illustrations show landscape orientations, the same ideas apply to the portrait orientation. The square that starts the space division can be based on either of the two shorter sides of the paper. Use of either the left-hand square or the right-hand one gives an unequal division of the picture space, and unequal areas in your picture enhance interest. For example, if your landscape contains a prominent tree or other key figure, a good placement for it (although by no means the only good placement for it) is somewhere on the vertical line formed by one of the squares. This would put the figure off center, which is generally a good idea. The use of the squares is just one of several ways of locating appropriate off-center places, key locations for key elements in your composition.

Triangular Division

The off-center placement of the key element of a picture was not always considered the only proper placement. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was frequently considered appropriate to place the central figure in a key location along the vertical centerline of the canvas. Often the central figure was placed more toward the top of the canvas with less important figures below in a triangular arrangement, sometimes in conjunction with a circle, square, or both (see figur...