Draughtsmanship vs Fine Motor Skills
Apr. 10th, 2007 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinI realized today I haven't posted in a week. No good reason. Haven't been that much busier than normal. Just extremely unmotivated and utterly sucked dry of inspiration for drawings. I have last week's sketchbook to scan (what there is of it anyway) but I'm at my sister's house so can't do that now. Instead, you can have an edited version of a ramble that developed in a letter to a friend (who I hope doesn't mind my posting it) that might be of use to someone out there. It might be complete codswallop, but it might not. I dunno. If you're bored...
DRAUGHTSMANSHIP VS FINE MOTOR SKILLS
First, to clarify what I mean by the terms ... these might not be the 'official' definitions, but they're how I categorize them and it pertains to what follows. Draughtsmanship is the ability to draw things accurately, whereas fine motor skills is the ability to have minute finesse in the muscles in your hand and arm. Glen Keane is a good draughtsman, according to this definition, even though he is very rough no matter what the medium, and I've never seen anything he's cleaned up. Cleanup, like painting on a grain of rice or writing calligraphy, is a fine motor skills thing, because it's all about controlling the motion of your tool to an infinitesimally small degree. Fine motor control is, I suspect, at least partly a genetic thing, because it seems to be the domain of more strictly biological things such as muscles and nerves. It also might have something to do with similar line quality between siblings, which I've noticed on occasion. Draughtsmanship, on the other hand (hahaha), is more of a hand-eye coordination thing, or more specifically an eye-brain-hand coordination thing, and deals more with creating the shapes and patterns you use to draw what you want, rather than what the actual individual lines look like. A draughtsman's line doesn't have to be a thing of precise mathematical vector-like beauty to accurately depict what he's trying to draw. If you're drawing a landscape from life, for example, good draughtsmanship will get you an accurate rendering of the perspective, the relative sizes of things, the angles and proportions, etc, whereas fine motor skills will give you the woodgrain on the bench, barnacles on the rock, or perfectly parallel window panes on a house two miles away.
The really crucial part to an accurate representational drawing is not how the detail is reproduced (who wants to see fine detail anyway?) but rather it goes right back to the beginning of the subject's eye-brain-hand route to your page, that is, how you see what you are drawing. You have to learn to look at what you are drawing almost geometrically, distinguishing relative angles between lines, general shapes, proportion, etc before you start drawing it. This is, I think, the edge that those who went through the 'extreme draughtsmanship' phase in high school have -- by obsessively copying photos they learn how to do this subconsciously, because an accurate reproduction depends on the geometry of your drawing matching the geometry of the original. It's sort of like that grid exercise, where you place a grid over the original, which renders it into little squares full of abstract lines, which are much easier to think about geometrically because you're not thinking about what they represent, just their relation to each other and to the walls of their cell in the grid. The draughtsman has simply learned how to expand this way of thinking to the non-gridded subject, be it a photo or a landscape or a naked man on a pedestal. You just look at the basic shapes and the relative angles of the lines that make up your subject, and voila! An accurate drawing. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is almost entirely about this sort of thing, and I'm probably just regurgitating it. Check out the book.
Learning 'how to see' really isn't that hard (despite my reference to it as 'geometry;' I couldn't think of a better word). It's a bit like learning to ride a bike; it's hard when you start and you fall down a lot but once you learn the tricks, you keep getting better and more confident. You must be on your guard, though, because there's an easy and comfortable trap you can fall into: when you're life drawing, or drawing from life especially because your reference is fleeting, your brain is filling in what your eye misses with what it already has in its library, so you're not absorbing much new stuff, just practicing the old. I know this is what I do when I'm bored or lazy or just not with it, which is far too often. Things that you have had to analyze get added to your mental library, so there's no reason that with an adequate amount of analysis in everyday life you shouldn't be able to do the same with the vast wealth of visual reference that surrounds you every day. Analytical seeing doesn't have to stop at accurately reproducing the contours of what you're drawing but you can also learn to see the structure of the model in different poses, which you can then apply to drawing characters. From there you can learn how to analyze the more subjective, expressive elements of what you see, which will bring life and energy to draughtsmanship that might otherwise be dull and mechanical. Learning to see the geometric relationships between lines and shapes is also crucial to constructing existing characters and keeping them on model, if you're interested in that sort of thing. It's a fabulously useful skill once you get used to using it.
Well, I think I'm going to go do something vaguely productive ... maybe ...
DRAUGHTSMANSHIP VS FINE MOTOR SKILLS
First, to clarify what I mean by the terms ... these might not be the 'official' definitions, but they're how I categorize them and it pertains to what follows. Draughtsmanship is the ability to draw things accurately, whereas fine motor skills is the ability to have minute finesse in the muscles in your hand and arm. Glen Keane is a good draughtsman, according to this definition, even though he is very rough no matter what the medium, and I've never seen anything he's cleaned up. Cleanup, like painting on a grain of rice or writing calligraphy, is a fine motor skills thing, because it's all about controlling the motion of your tool to an infinitesimally small degree. Fine motor control is, I suspect, at least partly a genetic thing, because it seems to be the domain of more strictly biological things such as muscles and nerves. It also might have something to do with similar line quality between siblings, which I've noticed on occasion. Draughtsmanship, on the other hand (hahaha), is more of a hand-eye coordination thing, or more specifically an eye-brain-hand coordination thing, and deals more with creating the shapes and patterns you use to draw what you want, rather than what the actual individual lines look like. A draughtsman's line doesn't have to be a thing of precise mathematical vector-like beauty to accurately depict what he's trying to draw. If you're drawing a landscape from life, for example, good draughtsmanship will get you an accurate rendering of the perspective, the relative sizes of things, the angles and proportions, etc, whereas fine motor skills will give you the woodgrain on the bench, barnacles on the rock, or perfectly parallel window panes on a house two miles away.
The really crucial part to an accurate representational drawing is not how the detail is reproduced (who wants to see fine detail anyway?) but rather it goes right back to the beginning of the subject's eye-brain-hand route to your page, that is, how you see what you are drawing. You have to learn to look at what you are drawing almost geometrically, distinguishing relative angles between lines, general shapes, proportion, etc before you start drawing it. This is, I think, the edge that those who went through the 'extreme draughtsmanship' phase in high school have -- by obsessively copying photos they learn how to do this subconsciously, because an accurate reproduction depends on the geometry of your drawing matching the geometry of the original. It's sort of like that grid exercise, where you place a grid over the original, which renders it into little squares full of abstract lines, which are much easier to think about geometrically because you're not thinking about what they represent, just their relation to each other and to the walls of their cell in the grid. The draughtsman has simply learned how to expand this way of thinking to the non-gridded subject, be it a photo or a landscape or a naked man on a pedestal. You just look at the basic shapes and the relative angles of the lines that make up your subject, and voila! An accurate drawing. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is almost entirely about this sort of thing, and I'm probably just regurgitating it. Check out the book.
Learning 'how to see' really isn't that hard (despite my reference to it as 'geometry;' I couldn't think of a better word). It's a bit like learning to ride a bike; it's hard when you start and you fall down a lot but once you learn the tricks, you keep getting better and more confident. You must be on your guard, though, because there's an easy and comfortable trap you can fall into: when you're life drawing, or drawing from life especially because your reference is fleeting, your brain is filling in what your eye misses with what it already has in its library, so you're not absorbing much new stuff, just practicing the old. I know this is what I do when I'm bored or lazy or just not with it, which is far too often. Things that you have had to analyze get added to your mental library, so there's no reason that with an adequate amount of analysis in everyday life you shouldn't be able to do the same with the vast wealth of visual reference that surrounds you every day. Analytical seeing doesn't have to stop at accurately reproducing the contours of what you're drawing but you can also learn to see the structure of the model in different poses, which you can then apply to drawing characters. From there you can learn how to analyze the more subjective, expressive elements of what you see, which will bring life and energy to draughtsmanship that might otherwise be dull and mechanical. Learning to see the geometric relationships between lines and shapes is also crucial to constructing existing characters and keeping them on model, if you're interested in that sort of thing. It's a fabulously useful skill once you get used to using it.
Well, I think I'm going to go do something vaguely productive ... maybe ...
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no subject
Date: 2007-04-11 11:24 am (UTC)Thankyou for posting that! I just got lent a copy of "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" and am about to start scrutinizing it chapter by chapter. I hope to apply whatever I learn to developing my (currently non-existent)perspective/layout drawing skills, and I found your post to be a helpful introduction!
no subject
Date: 2007-04-12 06:53 pm (UTC)Like most people when I started drawing I would concentrate on details instead of the proportions, and my people looked off. Years later when it comes to drawing I can see the proportions, but my pencil-pushing skills never caught up, and, being lazy, I stick to calligraphy.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-12 11:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-03 08:38 pm (UTC)