The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [74]
I usually recommend that students not try to designate an angle by degrees: a 45-degree angle; a 30-degree angle; etc. It really is best to simply remember the shape the angle makes when compared to vertical and horizontal and carry that visual shape in your mind to draw it. You may have to double-check angles a few times at first, but my students learn this skill very quickly.
The decision whether to use vertical or horizontal as the constant against which to see a particular angle occasionally puzzles students. I recommend that you choose whichever will produce the smaller angle.
I realize that sighting sounds very “left-brained” at this point. But remember we are searching out relationships. The right hemisphere is specialized for the perception of relationships—how things compare. As I said before, the “counting up” of sighting is just a simple way of “tagging” our perceptions. The Basic Unit is always “One,” because it is the first part of a comparison. After you practice sighting a bit, you are hardly aware of the process and it is very rapid. Also, with practice in drawing, you will be doing a lot of “eyeballing,” meaning estimating rather than needing to sight everything. But for any difficult perception, as in foreshortening, an experienced artist gladly uses sighting. Like negative space, sighting helps to make drawing easy.
Try to remember that drawing always produces an approximate version of the subject, even for a person highly skilled in drawing. Drawing is not photography. The person who is drawing consciously or subconsciously edits, emphasizes (or minimizes), or otherwise slightly changes various aspects of the subject. Students are often very critical of their work because it is not an exact rendition, but the subconscious choices made during drawing are part of the expressiveness of drawings.
Please note that in public places you will attract an audience of viewers who will very likely want to talk with you—not a good situation for maintaining an R-mode, wordless state of mind. On the other hand, if you would like to make some new friends, drawing in a public spot will work every time. For some reason, people who ordinarily would not approach a stranger do not hesitate to talk with someone who is drawing.
A “real” perspective drawing
What you’ll need:
• Your drawing board
• Several sheets of drawing paper, in a stack for padding
• Your masking tape
• Your drawing pencils, sharpened, and your eraser
• Your graphite stick and several paper towels or paper napkins
• Your plastic Picture Plane and your felt-tip marker
• Your larger Viewfinder
Before you start:
Tape a stack of several sheets of drawing paper to your drawing board. Draw a format on your drawing paper and tone the paper within the format to a medium gray tone. Draw the crosshairs on the toned paper.
1. Choose your subject. Learning how to draw “in proportion” and “in perspective” are the two great challenges—the Waterloo, even—of most drawing students in art schools. You will want to prove to yourself that you can achieve this skill. Therefore, pick your subject with that objective in mind: Choose a view or a site that you think would be really hard to draw—one with lots of angles or a complicated ceiling or a long view down a hall. See the student drawing on page 153. The best way to choose a site is to walk around, using your Viewfinder to find a composition that pleases you—much in the same way as composing with a camera’s viewfinder.
Possible sites:
• A kitchen corner
• A hallway
• A view through an open doorway
• A corner of any room in your house
• A porch or balcony
• Any street corner where you