40 Days of Art: Layers of Drawing

[tealin]

It can be intimidating even to start trying to put down on paper the infinitely complex, fully realised world around you. Much beginner art is compromised by an evident desire to draw everything at once, but this has a way of flattening a drawing, or making it look silted or stiff – even a still-life can look stiff if the artist is ill-at-ease. There is a lot of information to get on your page, and if you have unlimited time to do so it's very tempting to start noodling from the outset, but your result will not be as honest or evocative as it would be if you'd gotten down to the essence of the subject matter at the very beginning and layered on detail from there. You have to look at your subject through a series of different lenses: each is a different way of seeing what is going on, and each individual one is plenty to think about on its own. If you try to process the information from more than one or two lenses at a time your mental drawing software will freeze and/or crash.

This is a complicated idea and could be worth a whole week of illustrated posts, but you can find that information much better explained in Drawing From the Right Side of the Brain and Force, so I advise you to take your reading eyes in that direction.


So that you could see my source, I drew off a photo online, in this case from the World Cup.

	First you draw the gesture: the minimum number of lines that show the action, the idea of the pose or the composition. In this case, it's a swoopy gesture with the leg trailing back. The arms are secondary to the main idea of this pose, so I drew them after – I just wanted to save a step in scanning. ;) I like the 'I' base for the torso: vertical line illustrating whatever the spine is doing, and one horizontal line each for the shoulders and the hips, to give an idea for how they're situated in relation to each other. Limbs come off each of the corners of the I. Note that the leg is following the same sort of S-curve as the spine; it's all one idea.
	Then I sketch in the basic shapes and volumes, doing my best to preserve the idea and clarity of the gesture. At this point I realised the actual spine was curved in the opposite direction from which I'd indicated in the gesture so I fixed that. I also cheated the far leg out into open space a bit more for clarity's sake.
	On top of that, add the details: contour, anatomy, the edges of clothing, wrinkles (very good for communicating the contours and volume of the figure!), shoes, that sort of thing.