40 Days of Art: The Bradbury Snapshot
Mar. 25th, 2011 01:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinYou never know when you're going to come across something that will expand your artistic toolkit. I never thought, when I picked up a copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes in my senior year of high school, that it would teach me anything about drawing from life, but that was before I read this passage:
The idea of taking a mental snapshot stuck with me, and I tried doing it while doing observational sketches. When you're out in the real world, no one is going to pause for you to draw them, so you have to be pretty good at jotting down a quick impression. I found that it was much easier to get this impression down accurately if I pretended I was a camera (or Mr Cooger) and, when they reached a pose I wanted to capture, blinked – then held that image in my mind, with my eyes closed, transferring it from a passing impression to an image held in my short term memory, and tried to draw it immediately off this mental slide, without looking back up.
It's really hard at first, but I guarantee you the permanence of your mental snapshots will improve with practise. Back when this was the only sort of life drawing I could do, I got to the point where I could hold onto the image long enough to get a pretty decent rough sketch out of it, then would add details using logic and impression as the memory decayed. I'm not nearly so good at it now as I've been spoiled by years of formal life drawing, but I know that if I got in practise again it would come back.
The key is to know what to focus on – the curve of the spine, the relative positions of the limbs, the tilt of the head, rather than details of clothing, facial expression, hairstyle, and so on. What makes the pose that pose? What makes the person that person? Often you're capturing a flavour more than an actual likeness, so what are the most basic things that give that image that particular flavour? These sketches should take no more than one minute to do – thirty seconds is better; less if you can. They are not supposed to be pretty! As long as they capture a gesture, a moment, a personality, or a feeling, they're doing their job.
Aside from being a useful skill in general, this is great for drawing animals, which really don't hold still unless they're sleeping, and also for passing undetected in crowds – if you're constantly looking up and back from your sketchbook, checking your drawing, you might attract attention. As most beginning artists I know are mortified by the idea of drawing in public, this is a good thing to avoid and still get your sketchbook time in!
Mr Cooger, somewhere behind the eye-slits, went blink-click with his insect-Kodak pupils. The lenses exploded like suns, then burnt chilly and serene again.
He swivelled his glance to Jim. Blink-click. He had Jim flexed, focused, shot, developed, dried, filed away in dark. Blink-click.
... When their faces turned, Mr Cooger inside the nephew went silently blink-click, blink-click ...Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Chap. 19
The idea of taking a mental snapshot stuck with me, and I tried doing it while doing observational sketches. When you're out in the real world, no one is going to pause for you to draw them, so you have to be pretty good at jotting down a quick impression. I found that it was much easier to get this impression down accurately if I pretended I was a camera (or Mr Cooger) and, when they reached a pose I wanted to capture, blinked – then held that image in my mind, with my eyes closed, transferring it from a passing impression to an image held in my short term memory, and tried to draw it immediately off this mental slide, without looking back up.
It's really hard at first, but I guarantee you the permanence of your mental snapshots will improve with practise. Back when this was the only sort of life drawing I could do, I got to the point where I could hold onto the image long enough to get a pretty decent rough sketch out of it, then would add details using logic and impression as the memory decayed. I'm not nearly so good at it now as I've been spoiled by years of formal life drawing, but I know that if I got in practise again it would come back.
The key is to know what to focus on – the curve of the spine, the relative positions of the limbs, the tilt of the head, rather than details of clothing, facial expression, hairstyle, and so on. What makes the pose that pose? What makes the person that person? Often you're capturing a flavour more than an actual likeness, so what are the most basic things that give that image that particular flavour? These sketches should take no more than one minute to do – thirty seconds is better; less if you can. They are not supposed to be pretty! As long as they capture a gesture, a moment, a personality, or a feeling, they're doing their job.
Aside from being a useful skill in general, this is great for drawing animals, which really don't hold still unless they're sleeping, and also for passing undetected in crowds – if you're constantly looking up and back from your sketchbook, checking your drawing, you might attract attention. As most beginning artists I know are mortified by the idea of drawing in public, this is a good thing to avoid and still get your sketchbook time in!
