How Do You Want To See?

What would it be like to see like Rembrandt - to sense the gesture in all things, looking through to the ugliness and squalor and finding a harder beauty in that; what was that like? What was it like for him to walk down a street of an evening and how is it different for you today? Can we let him suggest to us the penetrating gaze, the love of everything alive and aging?

Rembrandt, black crayon on paper

Even if you're listening to 'Foster the People' in your headphones and everything is lit by street lamps and neon ads and the subway rumbles underneath you?

Is Rembrandt's experience and his gaze - 350 years old, pre-industrial, pre-electrical, pre-mass-media - unrecoverable, anachronistic? Do we have entirely new eyes?

There's a saying in Torah study that if Moses were to come to a temple today he wouldn't understand Torah, for he's missed 2500 years of commentary.

You aren’t coming to this school to be competent or just about good enough – this is about bringing what’s inside you out so that is bursts in the sunlight. You are in training to be astonishing.

When I was in art school I had a classmate - older, a returning student in his 40's - who called me at night and asked me with a manic glee if I had started the homework for our drawing class with Wayne Thiebaud, which was to copy a drawing by Honore Daumier. Because he had, he had been drawing for hours, and it had pulled him into an altered state of consciousness, as he was eager to tell me.

"The way Daumier draws is mind-blowing," Ron said, for that was his name. "He just scribbles until finds an edge that he likes, until he Hits something, then he Follows it, and makes it the Thing, and you know he couldn't tell if he was drawing it or it was drawing him. I can just feel it in my pencil! I know how he felt!" Then he whispered intensely - "and I've been listening to Shakespeare, Richard Burton reading Hamlet, and I'm thinking that's what Shakespeare was doing too, godammit - he spun, he scribbled, in the meter and the rhythm, until he Found something, the word or three words and then just followed them." His fervor was extremely funny. "I'm thinking this is weeeeiiird, man, I liiiike it!"

The very drawing we copied in class

In class Ron brought in his copied drawing and about 20 other drawings he had done in the fit of Daumier inspiration. Professor Thiebaud looked at them all, nodded, said, 'Not what I asked you to do … but … it will do …’ and walked on (he was a man of few words).

This, I've felt since then, is what homework should be about. This isn't drudgery, but a path to ecstasy! We're not here to make you draw better - we're pushing an altered state of consciousness!

When I went on to NYU, my teachers were man and women of the theater of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. They taught about designing for a world of entertainment that economically, artistically and technically doesn’t exist anymore - and yet their deeper lessons about design go through my mind every day. Even if I then turned their lessons on their heads.

For the next three years, remember this, lodge it in a protected place in your mind: It's going to feel at times like we're forcing you to draw, see, design in our way, the officially agreed-upon right way to be a designer, but it's really about surpassing and flying beyond, doing the confounding, fucked-up, most off-kilter and at the same time most profoundly appropriate thing in the world.

We're trying to train you to do the thing we don't understand and don't know is possible.

Camus said that no graduation ceremony is complete until the students consume the faculty.

I've been doing this for 20 years and I'm smart as hell and you should listen to me hard – and I want you to take everything I have, like a thief in the night, and misuse it all to your own ends.

Your Mission

Be astonishing. 

Have a great year!

A Selection of Drawings

Here is my very personal selection of some favorite drawings you all have sent me. The variety of styles and sensibilities is wonderful. This is going to be a brilliant year.

Caterina Da Via

Brynn Almli

Will Cotton

SeonYoung Ma

Christopher Metzger

Michael McGee

Michelle Roy

Michael Leon

Kimi Nishikawa

Joseph Blaha

Hannah Kittell

Dina El-Azziz

Blake Palmer

Hui Chen

Brian Fortin

Brendan Boston

Compostion

It’s not just how or what you put on the page but where. 

Edward Hopper sketchbook

A part of the grand scheme of creating images is to understand composition, the art of putting things together deliberately. The arrangement of visual elements, with an eye towards a sense of rhythm, balance or imbalance, is as fun as simply drawing itself.

 

The first given in a composition is the shape of the page and the ratio of the sides – rectangle or square, horizontal or vertical, thin or fat (we’re here assuming a shape like a rectangle and not a circle or other unusual shape for now). 

 

But we are not ruled by the random shape of the page decided for us by the paper manufacturers and their cutting machines! We are in charge! We can draw our own shape within the shape of the page, or even cut the page to suit our needs! We are unstoppable!

Any horizontal or vertical line we draw within the composition will resonate with the lines that bound our composition. Any diagonal line or curved line will provide contrast.

Our eyes seek lines to follow, and we can control where people look within a composition, and how quickly or slowly their eyes move within the drawing.

Drawing by Alphonse Mucha, showing a languid composition

Essentially, something first attracts the eye in the composition – a moment of high contrast, perhaps, with the most dynamic lights and darks within the drawing. Once this is investigated, the eye wanders along lines we have created to bring them through the rest of the composition in the way we like – slowly and languidly, along the curves of fabric, for instance, or quickly and dynamically, down the lines of a hallway perhaps. Do we lead the eye further into the composition, or move it out and away?

Symmetry is something to be played with – the center is a powerful spot. But does an object at the center gain or lose power and interest? Many compositions are asymmetrical, with the point of interest off to the side – why, we can ask ourselves, is this so interesting? I would suggest that we seek to balance and settle any composition, and when objects are placed off-center, we jump in and try balance it in our minds, thus becoming actively engaged in the image.

This is certainly a simple, verging on simplistic, overview of composition as a subject, but we’re just throwing everything in the mix here.

                                                                                                                                                        

Your Mission

This is a continuation of the sketchbook reporting mission from last week. Seat yourself comfortably somewhere, preferably with a cool beverage close by, and draw a rectangle in your sketchbook – a shape that is pleasing to you. Within this rectangle compose the scene before. What is the most interesting thing before you – an attractive person, an unusual chair, a strange plant, whatever. Put that somewhere within the composition, and arrange everything else around that. Simple as that! Just play around and see what resonance you can find between shapes and lines. This is open-ended – you’re diving in to see what you will discover, rather than making a 'correct' drawing. 

Edward Hopper notebook sketches

Edward Hopper Sketchbook

Reporting

This is really about how drawing works for designers. There are herds of drawing classes for the rest of humanity who are sadly not designers, where centuries of graphic tradition are heaped on people with no other point than to draw nice drawings. But we designers draw the way elephants use their trunks – it’s how we interact with the world, and how we communicate (so please picture an elephant trumpeting with his or her trunk when you are drawing).

             What makes a drawing a designer’s drawing? The point is not a display of skill or even to make a beautiful drawing (though both things are useful, in the background), but communicating. Design drawings are often covered in notes, the words and images combining to tell as much as possible - a costume sketch will note the silk trim and the distressed leather boots and in which act this character wears this, while set sketches note the glossy paint finish and where the wall moves between acts I and II, and so on.

            It is also about communicating with ourselves - we can argue that we don’t know how we see something until we draw it.

            The world is filled to bursting with surprising things, and it’s brilliant to keep a sketchbook to try to pin down fleeting appearances, and try to work out what the hell is happening here. Some of the notes and sketches could later be extremely useful, as you use a scribbled space or person as the inspiration for a design, but many will be just for interest, to keep your eyes open and your drawing muscles limber.

            Here are examples of pages from my own sketchbook, including recent times in airports. I’m looking at people and trying to figure out what’s going on – recording appearance but also asking what their relationships are, what’s propelling them. 

            Edward Hopper’s sketchbooks are filled with drawings that are so clearly for him, showing as much as he can with the pencil – form and shade – and using notes to record color and texture impressions, and reminders of the quality of light, the feeling of the shadows, etc.

            James Jean is a contemporary illustrator many of you may know of, who draws with an enviable freedom. Many of his sketchbooks are sold in reproduction, and many are online, like here.

            I still have my own sketchbooks from my time at NYU, 20 years ago. They’re there on a shelf with a couple dozen sketchbooks, filled with big and small ideas, all of it completely mine. By opening yourself to the strangeness and interest and boredom of the world, you can get a sense of who you are as an artist.

Your Mission

Grab your sketchbook, head to the coffee shop, and draw the people and the space. Or a bar or a park or a waiting room or wherever – if you are traveling, airports are perfect spaces to record humanity. Note details. Wildly speculate about whom these people are, what is happening in this space.

What are people doing or wearing that shows that it’s 2012? What signals are people putting out to the world? What signals are intentional, which are unintentional? You are doing research for the big picture.

Fabric

.

Every single designer needs to understand the qualities of fabric, what it does and why, and costume designers become complete experts on every seam and weave and thread. In the kit of symbols we learn to draw with, however, we don't really have workable marks for drawing fabric


In raising the level of our drawing, we want to move beyond the barely malleable bunch of symbols we've accumulated to create images - the 'eye' symbol, the 'hand' symbol, etc, like a set of stamps we pull out to use when we encounter these things.

The point of drawing observationally and responsively in our exercises is to break down the symbols we've learned and force ourselves to take in the surprising, unpredictable forms of reality. Opening ourselves to these forms, and passing them through the sequence of eye-to-brain-to-hand-to-paper, the forms become a part of our understanding, and we can then begin to draw from our imaginations with fantastic freedom and persuasiveness, which is the point of all of this, really.

I said before that we draw what something is Doing, not what it looks like. If we had the budget, I would issue everyone a parrot that would sit on your shoulders repeating this over and over.

We must always draw fabric by drawing the pull of gravity, what keeps the cloth from falling to the ground, and how does it twist and fold around forms. The dress, for example, that hangs from the shoulders and gathers across the chest and cascades down the back - it really helps to think in terms of active verbs that give life and energy to the forms of fabric. The dress is not just There - so much is happening!


Think of verbs that describe fabric; here's 15 off the top of my head:


Fall
Cascade
Drape
Spiral
Flow
Buckle
Stretch
Burst
Tear
Gather
Bunch
Pucker
Pinch
Drop
Twist

Can you add any? George Bridgeman, teaching at the Art Student's League a hundred years ago, broke down the different effects of fabric into the following five categories:

Now, even if fabric often acts like it never read any of Bridgeman's books, these are a really helpful guide, and repay study.

Your Mission

Take a piece of fabric, drape it over a chair, and draw it in pencil. Simple as that!

It may be a dress, a sheet, a towel, 2 yards of China silk - it's up to you. It should be a solid color without any pattern, and it probably should be a lighter tone for simplicity's sake. Convey the sense of the fabric's fall to the ground being impeded by the hard form of the chair. Use shading simply and clearly. Use line weight to make the overall form clear, and don't let the lines of folds and wrinkles overwhelm the drawing - big forms first, details within.

And show me that rather than just doing an exercise, you are opening yourself to the miracle of actuality before your very eyes, the joy of perception! As Blake said, all movements and all sights contain the seed of ecstasy!

Fabric Study, Leonardo Da Vinci
Ox Gall ink wash on prepared paper,
heightened with lead white

The Line

The summer advances, the fireflies are fewer, the air conditioner needs a rest. I hope everyone is mixing some of those fantastic summer things in with all your graduate school preparations, like eating frozen bananas while floating down a river in an inner tube, or whatever your version of a fantastic summertime thing is. 

This week's mission is simple and sweet, an important idea we'll conquer easily. 

Drawing is a complex activity, there's no doubt about it - when your pencil is moving around the paper there are so many things to consider, keep straight, balance, and it can always be better. Many of the aspects of drawing we're looking at quickly in this summer course are massive ideas - like Proportion, from week 2 - that we could spend months profitably turning this way and that. There are several ideas, though, that we can raise, consider for a week, then stash away for when it's useful later. 

Lines

We want our lines to be clear, responsive, and varied as they describe different surfaces, textures, hard and soft passages, etc. A drawing with one unchanging line doesn't pull us in - lines that have contrast interest us, helping describe the variety within the subject. 

Line Weight it one of those ideas that we can absorb quickly. We have several examples here of master draftsmen from various times. Moebius, the pen name of the French cartoonist Jean Giraud, who died this year, was a comic book artist with a beautiful free flowing line that he could vary so subtly - here, thicker lines brings objects into the foreground, while thinner lines are for details and distant objects.

Winsor McCay, who in addition to drawing the greatest of all Sunday comics, Little Nemo in Slumberland, was also a set and costume designer and speed sketch artist on the vaudeville stage, and if that wasn't enough he was an inventor of animation and its first great practitioner. He had an amazing technique of drawing the silhouette first, with a lovely thick line, and then quickly adding details. His mastery of perspective should be seen to be believed. 

Egon Schiele had a profound sense of line, and a profound sense of anatomy, and it is remarkable to see what he conveyed just with his responsive, varied outline, with really minimal lines within the form.

Rembrandt provides the most masterful use of varied line, here with quick brushstrokes that you can almost count, but his lines and tones are so varied, accomplishing so many things - I never get tired of looking at this drawing. 

When I was a design student I had a teacher lay down the law for drawing costume renderings: your thickest line for the silhouette; your next thickest line for lines of tailoring; your thinnest line for wrinkles and texture. Boom boom boom. I learned it that way, and while I happily vary it and change it around, the clarity this approach gives is undeniable. Here are some sketches done at the American Museum of Natural History, with a nice thick silhouette and detailed passages within the form with a thinner line. 

Your Mission

You may use two pens, like a Sharpie and a Mikron pen, with contrasting line widths, or you could use a pencil for this assignment. Choose a nice subject, with an interesting silhouette and interesting passages within. Some ideas:

A pile of shoes

A cauliflower

A stack of various books

A dress tossed on the floor

Six asparagus in a pile

You could also try this on the self-portrait you did earlier. 

Use your imagination and surprise and charm me. Do a quick quick sketch to establish the overall form, and then draw a good strong, descriptive silhouette. Then map out important details within - what's the least you can get away with and still have a drawing that's fun to look at? Don't worry about shading, this is purely an exercise in line. Make your lines definite and continuous - we're saying good bye to the wispy line.

Light and Shade

"I had some trouble with the shading." Possibly the most common sentence a student says about their drawing.

Drawing, in the Western art tradition, is an agreed upon lie:  to make marks on the surface of a piece of paper that create the illusion of depth. You could, very easily, list 40 other things drawing can be about, but our concern is representational drawing, and it has a particular vocabulary of marks and tones that we accept as describing three dimensions.

Degas said we have no natural sense of form - we must teach ourselves to perceive it consciously. I was startled when I first read that in Degas's letters, but with time I've become convinced he was right (and he was, after all, Degas). As we've said before here, we have to learn to consciously master the perceptions we register unconsciously.

Here is a circle.

There are really 5 ways of convincing the viewer that a circle drawn on paper is in fact a sphere:

1) Contour - we can describe the round surface with  lines, like the lines of latitude and longitude on a globe.

2) Chiaroscuro - where tonal contrast gives the impression of a light source that illuminates one part of a form more directly, while other parts fall away into shadow - we will look at this in greater detail below.

3) Overlap - one thing apparently obscuring another indicates one object is closer to the viewer than the other, and hence in space.

4) Aerial Perspective - the effect of atmosphere on objects of greater distance - a blurring of detail and contrast, and, in color, a shifting towards the blue that shows the effects of the intervening water molecules in the air. 

5) Repetition of Form - the large form suggests a foreground, and the small from suggests another object the same size but in the distance.

We're going to look at the first two ideas this week. The idea of a contour line that runs over the surface of a thing, describing the topography, is a very powerful way to understand the form. One of the reasons it's so fascinating to draw in this way is that it's immediately apparent when it's wrong - and hence is an excellent learning tool. Students, however, often tell me it 'messes up' their drawing - But not us! We will be bold and explore. 

Chiaroscuro, which literally means 'light-dark,' is a much fancier way of saying 'shading' - revealing the form through tones that mimic the effect of light and shadow on a form. 

Here are some thoughts:

We try to simplify the light source in our drawings - in life light bounces around everywhere, and in our modern lives we are often in environments with dozens of light sources. Here we assume a single light source, from the upper left, a traditional light direction in Western art. Light travels in straight lines until it meets an object, where light rays are either absorbed or bounce off. 

On this sphere, you can see how we see the light as it's bouncing towards us at different angles. The highlight is that spot where the light source bounces off the object directly into our eyes - the brightest spot. As the form turns away from the light source, less and less light finds its way to our eyes. If the form turns smoothly away from the light source - like a sphere - the lights subtly shades into a darker value. If it turns abruptly away, like the right angle of a cube, the tonal shift is likewise abrupt.

So here's a rule: when there's a change of plane, there is a change of tonal value.

Note the parts of the sphere here: 

The Highlight, which we've discussed - the brightest point. 

Twilight - where the form has turned away from the light to the point where the light just grazes the form. This is an important portion of the drawing, for it is here that we find texture expressed - and, in a color painting, this is where a red apple, say, is really red. 

The Shadow Core - the darkest point of the form, where the shape has turned fully away from the light source, but is not illuminated by the reflected light

Reflected light - Light bouncing up from another surface - in this case the surface the sphere sits on - casting light on the portion of the form that is essentially on the opposite side from the highlight. The reflected light, properly understood, is really what gives the sense of a fully dimensional form. 

Cast Shadow - The shape formed by the interruption of a light by an object, seen as a shade on another surface. Note that cast shadows generally have hard edges. Often in figure drawing classes teachers want the students to deemphasize cast shadows, for these hard edges can interfere with our understanding the body as a series of smooth forms. (But for costume renderings - excuse me if I get ahead of myself here - cast shadows are extremely important and often neglected by students - the shadow cast by the trim is as much apart of the design as the trim itself). 

One last thing to consider: let's imagine ten tones from white to black - if you've had art classes you likely have had to create these tones in pencil, watercolor, oil paint, etc. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, the Neoclassical painter, had his students mix 400 shades between absolute white and absolute black - and then do a painting of the figure that used all 400 shades. We will not require that of you. But begin to look at things and see if you can separate ten shades - that is 30%, that is 80% gray, etc. 

An important point: no longer can your shading be scribbly, which is how I would describe many of your drawings, To draw tonally means that we shouldn't be aware of the pencil marks, for lines that are too regular and parallel or seem random and scribbly sit too much on the surface of the paper and destroy the illusion of depth that is our goal.

A nice drawing has a pleasing balance of tone - it's up to you to decide what that balance is. But push things - make darks dark, and grays that have a full range.

Your Mission

It's summer and things are growing! And in the interest of promoting your health, I want you to buy some nice fruit and vegetables and draw them! (I worked as an cookbook illustrator when I was first out of college, and I loved that period when I always had little tableaux of vegetables on my drawing table). 

Two drawings: the first, a contour drawing of a fruit or vegetable, where you describe the surface with lines that move over the surface.

The second, a tonal study (it can be of a different fruit or vegetable if you like), of the fruit or vegetable sitting on a surface, with a beautiful sense of chiaroscuro. Keep the tones simple and clear.

Have fun. Don't fret. Feel free to eat your still life subject when you've completed the drawing. And here, for inspiration, are some still lives of things healthy and not, by my teacher, Wayne Thiebaud.