Kit-N-Kadoodle

helgesonart:

I little while back I got a great question on facebook, and I figured I’d share my reply. As always, these are my personal views, apply critical thinking. 

Q: I see that your girl sketches, traditional sketches in general, have a structure that brings out a lot of great shapes once you render the final lines. How much time do you dedicate to the structure? I find it hard to balance between structure and gesture. If I focus on structure I feel my drawings come out stiffer and lifeless. But most times when I focus on gesture I feel like my lines don’t help the final drawing.

A: It’s exactly as you say, too much focus on structure leads to boring and lifeless drawings, and too much focus on gesture leads to flimsy and inaccurate drawings. The trick is finding a balance, this is very difficult and something I struggle with continuously. As you say, being too loose initially will maybe give you a flowy base, but essentially useless as you move on to the next step of the drawing, where those initial lines can’t be used as a guide to start placing the major shapes and forms. The trick is to bring a sense of structure, proportion and anatomy at the same time as you’re putting down your more loose gestural lines. The difficult thing is, and this took me a long while to understand, all the skills, the structure, gesture, shape-design, shadow-shapes, anatomy, you kinda need to think of it all at the same time! You can practice all of them individually with focus, but in the end you need to learn all of them to such an extent that you can freely and effortlessly switch between them in your head. Every pose requires different tools. For example, when you have a lot of foreshortening, drawing out the cylindrical and box-type forms will be very helpful. For another pose which is easily readable you can be more gestural. In another case you can focus only on the light and dark value-pattern. In the end I just bring my entire arsenal of drawing-ability for every pose. Currently I am focusing a lot on creating shape-flow!  IMO, my structure and anatomy are my weak-points, even though I spent about two years studying it intensely with Glenn Vilppu’s drawing-manual and anatomy-books by Hogarth and Peck. I also have done a lot of life-drawing, and each time I would isolate on various weaknesses and focus on practicing on those. I’ve done A LOT of boring non-sexy structural drawings, which look nothing like the model, but mainly just wireframes and boxes and cylinders. It’s part of learning and shouldn’t be glossed over. It can be tempting to dive straight into doing sexy drawings, but I feel it’s necessary to spend time doing some boring-looking foundational drawings too.

Something very close to my heart is shape-design. Essentially I am trying to reduce all those complex forms and bumps into easily readable and appealing shapes. The distinction between form and shape is very important. In essence you want to avoid symmetry and parallels. There are four principles of shape design which I use. 1: Straight vs. Curve, 2: Tapering, 3: Rhythm and 4:Size Variation. I keep these in mind like a mantra, but at some point I reach a state of flow and they become sub-conscious.

Someone from the academic tradition of drawing will focus very much on the abstract shapes, constantly measuring, gauging and comparing whichever landmark is useful using straight lines making them gradually more smooth. I find this is helpful when drawing from a model, and bring some of that observation as you’re putting down your first gestural flowy lines.

Also something which I am conscious about right now is increasing depth using size-variation. So the closer something is to the viewer, the larger it’s perceived. I have a tendency to flatten things on the image-plane.

A few years ago I met with Glenn Vilppu at a drawing-workshop, and the advice he was giving me was not useful, because he kept on talking about spheres and forms etc, which is cool and useful in general, but not what I needed. Vilppu rarely talks about shape, and even though I have profound respect for him and his methods (I couldn’t draw without him) there comes a time to kinda break away on your own. I also don’t find his drawings very appealing, they feel too gesturally conceived and fleshy. I really like what Alex Woo is doing, and Dave Pimentel and Griz & Norm.

What you don’t see in my posts is the amounts of failed drawings, I’m cherry-picking the ones which turn out decent. I’d say my success-ratio is somewhere like five bad drawings for every good one. I am constantly searching for failures and learning-experiences, the frustration is something you learn to deal with over time.