The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [91]
• Three-quarter view: The model makes a half-turn toward the artist’s left or right, making visible to the artist three-quarters of the model’s face—the profile (one half) plus one quarter of the remaining half-face.
Note that the full-face and profile views are relatively invariant, while the three-quarter view can vary from an almost profile to an almost full-face pose and still be called a “three-quarter view.”
John Singer Sargent, 1856-1925. Study for “Madame X.” Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Frances Ormond and Miss Emily Sargent, 1931
John Singer Sargent, 1856-1925. Olimpio Fusco, c. 1905-15? Courtesy of The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828-82. Jane Burden, Later Mrs. William Morris, as Queen Guinevere. Courtesy of The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
Fig. 10-5.
Fig. 10-6.
A warm-up exercise: A copy of the Courbet self-portrait
Imagine that you are honored by a visit from the nineteenth-century French artist, Gustave Courbet (pronounced goos-tav koorbay), and that he has agreed to sit for a portrait drawing, wearing his jaunty hat and smoking his pipe. The artist is in a rather serious mood, quiet and thoughtful. See Figure. 10-3, page 197.
Imagine further that you have arranged a spotlight so that it shines from above and in front of Courbet, illuminating the top of his face but leaving the eyes and much of the face and neck in rather deep shadow. Take a moment to consciously see how the lights and shadows logically fall relative to the source of light. Then turn the book upside-down to see the shadows as a pattern of shapes. The wall behind is dark, silhouetting your model.
What you’ll need:
1. Your #4B drawing pencil
2. Your eraser
3. Your clear plastic Picture Plane
4. A stack of three or four sheets of drawing paper
5. Your graphite stick and some paper napkins
What you’ll do:
Please read through all of the instructions before starting.
1. As always, draw a format edge on your drawing paper, using the outside edge of one of your Viewfinders. This format is in the same proportion, width to height, as the reproduction.
2. Tone your paper with a rubbed graphite ground to a medium-dark silvery gray—about the tone of the wall behind Courbet. Lightly draw the crosshairs as shown in Figure 10-5. You may wish to copy this drawing upside down.
3. Set your Picture Plane on top of the reproduction of the Courbet drawing. The crosshairs on the plastic Picture Plane will instantly show you where to locate the essential points of the drawing. I suggest that you work upside down for at least the first “blocking in” of the lights and shadows (Figure. 10-6).
4. Decide on a Basic Unit, perhaps the light-shape from the center of the hat brim to the top of the upper lip, or perhaps the pipe stem, or you may decide on another Basic Unit. Remember that everything in Courbet’s drawing is locked into a relationship. For this reason, you can start with any Basic Unit and end up with the correct relationships. Then, transfer your Basic Unit to the drawing paper, following the instructions on page 130 and in Figures 8-11 and 8-12, page 146.
Note: The step-by-step procedure I offer below is only a suggestion about how to proceed. You may wish to use an entirely different sequence. Also note that I am naming parts of the drawing only for instructional purposes. As you draw, try your best to see the shapes of lights and darks wordlessly. I realize that this is like trying not to think of the word “elephant,” but as you continue to draw, thinking wordlessly becomes second nature.
5. You will be “drawing” with an eraser. Sharpen your eraser into a drawing tool by cutting one end into a wedge shape as shown in Figure 10-7.
Begin by erasing out the major shapes of light, on the face, hat, and shirtfront, always checking the size and position of those shapes against your Basic Unit. You might think of these light-shapes as negative shapes that share edges with the dark forms. By correctly