40 Days of Art: Loosening Up
Mar. 28th, 2011 05:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinI am one of nature's noodlers – I am naturally inclined to be very hesitant about my lines, very careful, detail-oriented, reluctant to do anything bold or expressive. My artistic career has been (and will undoubtedly continue to be) one long education in how to loosen up and get some life in my work. I will share with you today some of the techniques I've learned for doing so, but I want to clarify before I get started that I am far from being an expert on these things and more often than not could do with a good dose of my own advice.
First off: why should you loosen up? Well, primarily, because the human brain tends to smooth things out, make them simpler, or more constrained. Possibly this is a way to compress them for easier processing, I don't know, but the fact is that even if you want to draw something accurately, you have to do what feels to some degree like caricature. Going beyond accuracy, getting a gestural drawing of what your subject feels like, can bring out its inner truth, and depict the idea of it more purely than its mere appearance can. And on a practical level, getting a loose base sketch down quickly can vastly improve the speed at which you draw, something you will come to value immensely if you're drawing a moving subject, or while travelling, or (heaven forbid!) to a deadline.
Also, by jotting down a quick, loose sketch of what you want, if you have to change something, you only have to erase a few lines and a few seconds' work, rather than a whole lot of laborious detail. It makes it much easier, both emotionally and physically, to correct yourself until you get it right – and it's through these self-corrections that you learn.
Most of these tricks involve lessening your control over your line. The more you can finely control your line, the more cerebral it is, and the less you get that raw expression of energy straight from the heart or gut or wherever it comes from.
One of the first things I learned in life drawing class was the necessity of transferring the motion of my pencil from my fingers, where the pencil was held, up to my arm. This forces you to make big sweeping strokes with a lot more energy in them, and makes noodling at an early stage impossible. The muscles that control your arm are much bigger than the ones that do your fingers, and are not made for detail work. If you are a finger-drawer, try working up joint by joint: draw only with motions of your wrist, then your elbow, then finally with the motion of your shoulder. You'll have to draw larger than you might be used to, but that's a good thing! Ideally all drawings should be started with some gestural lines from your arm that capture the 'broad strokes' of what you're trying to depict.
Another way to prevent yourself from getting seduced by detail is to hold your pencil further away from the tip. The closer your fingers are to the point where it makes a mark on the page, the more control you have. If you're having trouble remembering to draw from your arm, scoot your fingers a couple inches back on your pencil. This should make it much harder to draw with small movements in your hand and wrist, and so force movement up into your arm.
A bigger change you can make in pencil grip, and one which I find more practicable, is the position in which you hold your pencil – instead of the traditional fingers-clustered-around-the-tip hold, try holding it like a paintbrush, or like a table knife, some way which gives less flexibility to your fingers. I use the latter, overhand technique when life drawing, and if I find I need to loosen up while drawing from my head I'll flip my pencil around and use it then too. This technique puts your pencil at a much flatter angle to the page, so you're drawing with the side of the lead rather than the point. You get a wide fuzzy line rather than a crisp one, which forces you to put down basic shapes and broad strokes as really that's all you can manage.
Pencils are the noodler's dream – they can get you about as fine a level of detail as you could wish from any medium, and you can keep sharpening them. To prevent yourself from slipping into old ways, try using a medium that can't get you such neat lines: chalk, china marker, pastel, brush pen, charcoal, paintbrush, felt tip marker ... try them all, see which one you're most compatible with. I have often thought it would be fun to do life drawing with an eyebrow pencil, but it would probably run out in about ten minutes and I'd spend a fortune keeping them in stock.
Of course, if you only have thirty seconds to get your drawing down, you have no choice but to make it fast and loose! My life drawing classes is school always started with about an hour of one-minute poses, to get us all loosened up. It's amazing what you can get down in a minute with practise. And, once you get to the point where you can get all the basic info down in a minute, when you get a five- or ten-minute pose you have nearly all that time to think about things like anatomy and lighting, rather than just getting the pose right. If you're out doing observational sketches, your models don't have the thoughtfulness to hold still for you, so you have to draw fast in order not to forget what they looked like. The faster you move your pencil, the more lively your drawing will be!
Loosen up, man! Just let it floooow... remember, you can always go back in and tie it down later.
First off: why should you loosen up? Well, primarily, because the human brain tends to smooth things out, make them simpler, or more constrained. Possibly this is a way to compress them for easier processing, I don't know, but the fact is that even if you want to draw something accurately, you have to do what feels to some degree like caricature. Going beyond accuracy, getting a gestural drawing of what your subject feels like, can bring out its inner truth, and depict the idea of it more purely than its mere appearance can. And on a practical level, getting a loose base sketch down quickly can vastly improve the speed at which you draw, something you will come to value immensely if you're drawing a moving subject, or while travelling, or (heaven forbid!) to a deadline.
Also, by jotting down a quick, loose sketch of what you want, if you have to change something, you only have to erase a few lines and a few seconds' work, rather than a whole lot of laborious detail. It makes it much easier, both emotionally and physically, to correct yourself until you get it right – and it's through these self-corrections that you learn.
Most of these tricks involve lessening your control over your line. The more you can finely control your line, the more cerebral it is, and the less you get that raw expression of energy straight from the heart or gut or wherever it comes from.
One of the first things I learned in life drawing class was the necessity of transferring the motion of my pencil from my fingers, where the pencil was held, up to my arm. This forces you to make big sweeping strokes with a lot more energy in them, and makes noodling at an early stage impossible. The muscles that control your arm are much bigger than the ones that do your fingers, and are not made for detail work. If you are a finger-drawer, try working up joint by joint: draw only with motions of your wrist, then your elbow, then finally with the motion of your shoulder. You'll have to draw larger than you might be used to, but that's a good thing! Ideally all drawings should be started with some gestural lines from your arm that capture the 'broad strokes' of what you're trying to depict.
Another way to prevent yourself from getting seduced by detail is to hold your pencil further away from the tip. The closer your fingers are to the point where it makes a mark on the page, the more control you have. If you're having trouble remembering to draw from your arm, scoot your fingers a couple inches back on your pencil. This should make it much harder to draw with small movements in your hand and wrist, and so force movement up into your arm.
A bigger change you can make in pencil grip, and one which I find more practicable, is the position in which you hold your pencil – instead of the traditional fingers-clustered-around-the-tip hold, try holding it like a paintbrush, or like a table knife, some way which gives less flexibility to your fingers. I use the latter, overhand technique when life drawing, and if I find I need to loosen up while drawing from my head I'll flip my pencil around and use it then too. This technique puts your pencil at a much flatter angle to the page, so you're drawing with the side of the lead rather than the point. You get a wide fuzzy line rather than a crisp one, which forces you to put down basic shapes and broad strokes as really that's all you can manage.
Pencils are the noodler's dream – they can get you about as fine a level of detail as you could wish from any medium, and you can keep sharpening them. To prevent yourself from slipping into old ways, try using a medium that can't get you such neat lines: chalk, china marker, pastel, brush pen, charcoal, paintbrush, felt tip marker ... try them all, see which one you're most compatible with. I have often thought it would be fun to do life drawing with an eyebrow pencil, but it would probably run out in about ten minutes and I'd spend a fortune keeping them in stock.
Of course, if you only have thirty seconds to get your drawing down, you have no choice but to make it fast and loose! My life drawing classes is school always started with about an hour of one-minute poses, to get us all loosened up. It's amazing what you can get down in a minute with practise. And, once you get to the point where you can get all the basic info down in a minute, when you get a five- or ten-minute pose you have nearly all that time to think about things like anatomy and lighting, rather than just getting the pose right. If you're out doing observational sketches, your models don't have the thoughtfulness to hold still for you, so you have to draw fast in order not to forget what they looked like. The faster you move your pencil, the more lively your drawing will be!
Loosen up, man! Just let it floooow... remember, you can always go back in and tie it down later.
