The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [76]
2. Be sure to use negative spaces as an important part of your drawing as in Figure 8-24. You will add strength to your drawing if you use negative space to see and draw small items such as lamps, tables, signs with lettering, and so on. If you do not, and focus only on the positive shapes, they will tend to weaken your drawing. If you are drawing a landscape, trees and foliage in particular are much stronger when their negative spaces are emphasized.
3. Once you have completed the main parts of the drawing, you can focus on the lights and shadows. “Squinting” your eyes a bit will blur the details and allow you to see large shapes of lighted areas and shadowed areas. Again using your new sighting skills, you can erase out the shapes of lights and use your pencil to darken in the shapes of shadows. These shapes are sighted in exactly the same way as you have sighted the other parts of the drawing: “What is the angle of that shadow relative to horizontal? How wide is that streak of light relative to the width of the window?”
4. If any part of the drawing seems “off” or “out of drawing,” as such errors are called, check out the troublesome area with your clear plastic Picture Plane. Look at the image on the plane (with one eye closed, of course) and alternately glance down at your drawing to double-check angles and proportions. Make any corrections that seem reasonably easy to make.
Fig. 8-24. Remember to emphasize negative spaces in your drawing.
Artist/teacher Robert Henri sends a stern warning to his students:
“If in your drawing you habitually disregard proportions you become accustomed to the sight of distortion and lose critical ability. A person living in squalor eventually gets used to it.”
— The Art Spirit, 1923.
After you have finished:
Congratulations! You have just accomplished a task that many university art students would find daunting if not impossible.
Sighting is an aptly named skill. You take a sight and you see things as they really appear on the picture-plane. This skill will enable you to draw anything you can see with your own eyes. You need not search for “easy” subjects. You will be able to draw anything at all.
The skill of sighting takes some practice to master, but very soon you will find yourself “just drawing,” taking sights automatically, at times even without needing to measure proportions or assess angles. I think it’s significant that this is called “eyeballing.” Also, when you come to the difficult foreshortened parts, you will have just the skills needed to make the drawing seem easy.
Fig. 8-25. Charles White, Preacher (1952). Courtesy of the Whitney Museum.
This drawing by Charles White demonstrates a foreshortened view. Study it. Copy it, turning the drawing upside down if necessary. You might use the length of the man’s left hand from the wrist to the tip of the pointing finger as your Basic Unit. Perhaps you’ll be surprised to find that the ratio of the head to the model’s left hand is 1:1.
Each time you experience the fact that drawing just what you see works the wonder of creating the illusion of space and volume on the flat surface of the paper, the methods will become more securely integrated as your way of seeing—the artist’s way of seeing.
Fig. 8-26. Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Dancer Adjusting Her Slipper (1873). Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. The H. O. Havemeyer Collection
The Use of Sighting in Figure Drawing
This technique of using the constants, vertical and horizontal, against which to gauge angles is an important basic skill in drawing figures as well as objects. Many artists’ sketches still show traces of sight lines drawn in by the artist, as in the Edgar Degas drawing entitled Dancer Adjusting Her Slipper (Figure 8-26). Degas was probably sighting such points as the location of the left toe in relation to