Drawing

Texture like pulmonary arteries

I've been thinking about drawing often in the past few weeks. I realize that strong and confident drawing skills are one of the abilities that I value and admire most, in others and in myself.

There was a time when I did some drawing almost every day – but that was many years ago. I must remember the challenge and contentment that I experience while drawing, and to work with this method of expression more often.

This is the original version an essay that I wrote in one of my creative non-fiction writing classes in December, 2005. It's interesting to re-visit these compositions years later, and notice which parts still resonate, and which parts I'm compelled to edit.

Drawing Techniques

1. Mass: The use of line or tone in a drawing to give the impression of three-dimensionality and depth.

Her grandpa is a good drawer. They spend hours together at the dining room table with piles of paper and pencil crayons and oil pastels when her parents are away. They have colouring books too, but they both like to use empty sheets of paper so they won’t be interrupted by someone else’s thick black lines. He draws birds and people and mountains. She likes to draw people and houses and cats. She is three years old. Her people have two-dimensional bodies and three-dimensional hands and feet that attach to long, stick-figure arms and legs. Their faces are expressive; sometimes their grins extend past the edges of their cheeks. They are often riding bicycles in tall grass.

One day grandpa says, “try making your people like this.” He shows her how to add three-dimensional bodies with clothing that has buttons down the front. She draws a lady in a plump green dress with buttons and a ruffled collar. But she is not sure if this new style is a good idea. She knows that she can draw this kind of body, but it will take too much time and practice to learn to draw one of these fancy three-dimensional people on a bicycle. It’s too difficult because it is really hard to draw three-dimensional bicycles. And everyone knows that three-dimensional people can’t ride two-dimensional bicycles. They would fall off.


2. Contour: A line that follows the outer edge of a form.

The high school art room smells like the comfortingly pungent collaboration of permanent markers, musty clay and turpentine. The tables are arranged in a cumbersome circle. Students draw on sheets of white bond paper – 18 by 24 inches. These dimensions translate into 864 square inches of potential surface area, because she uses both sides of the page. Her art teacher, Ms. Hinchberger, instructs the class about how to use drawing techniques that will allow her to convince viewers that a three-dimensional object exists in a two-dimensional plane. At the time, this skill is synonymous with freedom.

The students are drawing a collection of richly textured surfaces that are spilling across the table – leaves, rocks and found objects on fabric that is draped and crumpled. “Imagine that you are an ant, crawling along each edge of each object. Go slowly. You must feel every detail,” says Ms. Hinchberger. The students are instructed to look carefully so that they will learn to draw evocative contour lines that will express exactly what they mean. She discovers that the secret is to let her eyes trace the edges and planes of forms slowly, so that her pencil can stay at precisely the same point as her gaze. Other days they draw figures – students take turns modeling. “Explore the textures, and describe them with your charcoal. Experiment! Vary your mark-making.”

One day, they learn to do blind drawings using only their tactile senses. She doesn’t look at the rock that she is holding, or the paper that she is carefully describing it onto. She is spread out – drawing on the floor. When she is finished, the lines on the page transmit the essence of the rock in the absence of a representational visual description.


3. Composition: The organization of elements in pictoral space.

She is working on a series of drawings in ink an oil pastel on a long sheet from the roll of brown paper in the supply closet. She is trying to reveal the essence of objects; it is her first venture into the practice of abstraction. It began spontaneously because she wanted to describe the insides of things – interiors of a backpack, a freezer, an envelope containing a love letter sent from far away. These small compositions are arranged from left to right across the paper, blurring the divisions between each interior, and challenging the edges of the picture plane.

She is in grade eleven, and confident in her knowledge and skill. Right now, she has luxury of making art in the absence of doubt and uncertainty. She labels the essence that she tries to capture in her drawings ‘is-ness.’ It’s a word that refers to the absolute fundamental integrity of an object – a distilled core.


4. Gesture: Quick scribbles or marks designed to show movement or action by flowing over and through the interior of a form or composition.

They begin the class with a series of gesture poses to warm up; the model holds each position for one minute – just long enough for the students to capture the essence of the pose in a few lines that suggest energy and motion. Gesture drawing is physically demanding, tiring, exhilarating – the artists’ bodies are thoroughly involved and respond with a flood of adrenaline and awareness. Their rapt attention is impermeable now. As she draws, her sharpie marker gets dull and dry; she switches to a stick of graphite. She makes marks on the paper with the tip, the edge and the flat surface of the stick without stopping.

It was the only time that she ever lied about her age. “Yes. I’m eighteen,” she said when she registered in a drawing course advertised in a fall brochure of public art classes. She was sixteen at the time. It was a life drawing class. She wanted to draw models that were not wearing the baggy clothes and self-consciousness of her high school peers.

Her classmates and her instructor are all middle-aged women – some with drawing experience and some without. By the time they realize her age she has already proved that she is serious about the subject matter. She has earned a place in this class by demonstrating her commitment to the drawing process.

Through figure drawing, she slowly comes to know a body intimately as a collection of flowing lines of energy that extend past the farthest reaches of fingertips and angled knees. Each pose reveals something new. Three hours pass in an instant.


5. Negative Space: The shape of space around an object, between several objects, or in an opening within an object.

She walks up the hill to school this morning with her drawing portfolio and a red toolbox full of supplies. Charcoal, pencils, tape, rags, string. When she arrives in class, there is a tangle of chairs and boxes assembled in the centre of the room. For five hours they draw everything that isn’t there – the spaces between each object. The result is a complex abstraction; it is reminiscent of the objects, but it does not quite describe them.

Homework. She draws only empty space for a week. This exercise provokes a series of drawings of the spaces between objects that clutter her small apartment. She looks along edges and through holes. It is a matter of obscuring each object into its most fundamental shapes. She collects these shapes, and immortalizes them. They are vessels that contain her daily life. Overlap and omission are as important as the objects themselves.


6. Perspective: The technical means by which forms can be positioned in the implied three-dimensional space of a picture.

Her drawing professor’s thumbs are famous. Most alumni from the Alberta College of Art and Design know this particular professor's substantial thumbs. They come over her shoulder when she is most thoroughly absorbed in her work. They correct lines of perspective, and adjust the distance between objects. His intervention is part of the process of revision – both frustrating and illuminating.

Re-vision; to see differently. She has learned to start with a general sketch – to suggest the composition, but to resist becoming too attached to a particular outcome too soon. Whenever she commits too early, she provokes frustration. No one in her class gets too attached to a drawing until it is finished and rolled up under the bed for safekeeping – out of the way until the final critique at the end of the semester.


7. Mark-making: The process of using art materials to create a variety marks in a drawing to describe details of form and texture.

November. She is sitting at the edge of a path through the forest with a sketchbook and pencils and so many ideas. In the forest she tries to describe the untranslatable language of tree forms. The trees are lithe figures against the sky, reaching upward. She will try her best to describe the forest in hibernation. She knows that this environment cannot be precisely captured in lines of charcoal, or lines of words. That is why she keeps returning to the forest – she always finds something new that didn’t reveal itself before. She tries to turn her observations into marks on the page, from images into lines; from ideas into words.

Mark-making is thrilling. It becomes an independent element of the composition – it is descriptive texture. She drags a stick of charcoal or a pencil or a brush filled with ink across paper to convey a sense of the world – telling more than is visible to the eye.

But beginning a drawing throws her into a state of liminality each time. It is a familiar process, but it will never be comfortable. She may never be thoroughly satisfied, or finished. She must always look again.

o