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5. Now, holding you hand in the same foreshortened position as before, balance the Viewfinder/plastic Picture Plane on the tips of your fingers and thumb. Move it about a bit until the picture-plane seems balanced comfortably.

6. Pick up your uncapped marking pen, gaze at the hand under the plastic Picture Plane and close one eye. (I’ll explain in the next segment why it is necessary to close one eye. For now, please just do it.) See Figure 6-5.

7. Choose an edge to start your drawing. Any edge will do. With the marking pen, begin to draw on the plastic Picture Plane the edges of the shapes just as you see them. Don’t try to “second guess” any of the edges. Do not name the parts. Do not wonder why the edges are the way they are. Your job, just as in Upside-Down Drawing and in Pure Contour Drawing, is to draw exactly what you see, with as much detail as you can manage with the marking pen (which is not as precise as a pencil).

8. Be sure to keep your head in the same place and keep one eye closed. Don’t move your head to try to “see around” the form. Keep it still. (Again, I’ll explain why in the next segment.)

9. Correct any lines you wish by just wiping them off with a moistened tissue on your forefinger. It is very easy to redraw them more precisely.

Fig. 6-3.

Fig. 6-4.

Fig. 6-5.

Fig. 6-6. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Hands in Adoration. Black and white tempera on blue paper. Albertina Museum, Vienna.

Fig. 6-7. Vincent Van Gogh, Sketches with Two Sowers. St. Remy, 1890.

After you have finished:

Place the plastic Picture Plane on a plain sheet of paper so that you can clearly see what you have drawn. I can predict with confidence that you will be amazed. With relatively little effort, you have accomplished one of the truly difficult tasks in drawing—drawing the human hand in foreshortened view. Great artists in the past have practiced drawing hands over and over. Observe the examples by Albrecht Dürer and Vincent Van Gogh, Figures 6-6 and 6-7.

How did you accomplish this so easily? The answer, of course, is that you did what a trained artist does: You “copied” what you saw on the picture-plane—in this instance, an actual plastic plane. I fully define and explain the Picture Plane in the next section. For now, you are simply using it. I have found that the explanation makes more sense after students have used the plastic plane.

For further practice: I suggest that you erase your felt-tip pen drawing from the Picture Plane with a damp tissue and do several more, with your hand in a different position each time. Try for the really “hard” views—the more complicated the better. Oddly enough, the flat hand is the hardest to draw; a complex position is actually easier. Therefore, arrange your hand with the fingers curved, entwined, crossed, fist clenched, whatever. Try to include some foreshortening. Remember, the more you practice each of these exercises, the faster you will progress. Save your last (or best) drawing for the next exercise.

This brings us to a crucial question—that is, an all-important question in terms of your understanding: What is drawing?

The quick answer: Drawing is “copying” what you see on the picture-plane. In the drawing you did just now, your own hand in foreshortened view, you “copied” the “flattened” image of your hand that you “saw” on the plastic Picture Plane.

And now, a more complete answer to the question, “What is drawing?”

In art, the concept of “the picture plane” is extremely abstract and difficult to explain, and even more difficult to comprehend. But this concept is one of the most important keys to learning to draw, so stay with me. I’ll try to be clear.

The picture plane is a mental concept. See this in your “mind’s eye”: the picture plane is an imaginary transparent plane, like a framed window, that is always hanging out in front of the artist’s face, always parallel to the “plane” of the artist’s two eyes. If the artist turns, the plane also turns. What the artist