thinkfetti

Our Christmas luminarias are burning tonight!

One of the principal lessons from my drawing study so far is that it is very effective to start with the general and then add increasingly specific details. When I started my drawing course, I made the same error common to many beginners: I started with details. The inevitable result was that these fancy, particular details, as well as they might look in isolation, never fit together properly. The proportions of the whole ended up off, or the details from one part of the drawing never matched up with those from another part of the drawing when they met.

If I started from the bottom and worked consistently upwards, the details fit together (more or less), but the overall proportions of the drawing didn’t work.

If I started in more than one place, such as from the top and bottom working toward the center, there would be a collision of mismatched details somewhere in the middle of the page.

What has worked, over and over again, is to start with only the most general, global features of the drawing, and then layering in increasing specific pieces across the whole field of the drawing. Sometimes, I will focus for awhile on one portion of the drawing, but not to the point of “finishing it” before moving to another part of the drawing.

The experience of drawing this way is to see the drawing emerge from the page. It’s very satisfying when it works.

One very helpful strategy I’ve learned in my Drawing I course is to spend enough time up front doing two things: getting the proportions and general angles right, and getting the large-scale values (relative lights and darks) close to their actual appearance in the subject.

By focusing on the general qualities of the drawing before addressing any specifics, such as edges or details, I find the drawing mostly continues to improve as I work. Earlier, when I started in on specifics too soon in the process, I would “draw myself into a hole”: I would reach a point where something was wrong, and there was no easy way to remedy it.

I’m taking a Drawing I class this semester. We cover a variety of non-color media. Here’s the score this week:

Charcoal: 7
Doug: 0

Practicing can be fulfilling for its own sake; it can also be the most efficient way to get better at something, if you happen to be practicing correctly. And therein, as the poet wrote, lies the rub.

If we imagine the world of techniques as a two-dimensional landscape, and the success of a particular technique as the elevation above the corresponding spot in the two-dimensional world, we’ll have a version of what is called a “fitness landscape.”

If there’s one best way to do something, then the elevation above the spot corresponding to that best technique will be the highest of the whole terrain, the “top of the mountain,” if you will.

If you imagine yourself as on this fitness terrain, improving means heading uphill. Sometimes, it’s obvious which way is uphill, and sometimes it isn’t. Or the direction that’s uphill where you are now might not be the direction to the top of the mountain.

This metaphor supports a lot more nuance, but even at this level of broad strokes, it should be clear:

To improve, practice may be necessary, but it isn’t (necessarily!) sufficient.

The blending stump is an artist’s tool, used for blending shading lines into smooth shading, or “value.” It’s made of something like paper, sharpened into something like pencil shape, but the end of it is not perfectly sharp or defined, but rather like a small top knot.

Blending with a blending stump is hard (for me, at least). It’s easy to run over the border or contour I’m trying to blend toward, so the distinction between one, smoothly varying shape and the neighboring, also smoothly varying shape is violated, blurred.

Or, being afraid of running over the borderline, I don’t blend close enough to the border contour, and so there’s a region of blended values and then a border of unblended pencil strokes close to the border line itself.

I think of my time as department chair at my university, and of the problems I faced as ombudsman and general, all-around smoother of disagreements and angry people. It’s true: there was always either too much smoothing (real distinctions were “brushed over” in the effort to cool tempers), or not enough smoothing (sometimes, it’s just not practical or even possible to smooth and soothe to the point where everything looks balanced.)

The choice is then whether or not to keep practicing, in spite of the limitations of yourself and your materials.