Drawing Page

Golden Mean Contour Drawing Negative Space Smudging Fixing Charcoal Making Pastels Finding Models

Drawing Hands Drawing Eyes Human Proportions Wrinkles in Portraits Cross-hatching Contour Shading

A Trois Crayons Blending Pastels Making Charcoal and Ink Silverpoint Supplies Copies of Drawings Camera Lucida

How can I make my own pastels?

Crude Pastel Recipe:
Boil 1/4 cup rolled oats in quart of water for five minutes. Filter oat the oats and use the oat water to make a play dough like dough (malleable but not sticky) out of good quality childrens' powdered tempera and talc only baby powder. A good starting point for the dough would be half a cup of talc, two tablespoons of pigment and a teaspoon of the oat water. If you are using real pigments the talc/color mix should maybe start at half-and-half. You can add varying degrees of white tempera to get lighter tints. Roll dough into pencil thick snakes on sheet of newsprint and cut into finger length segments. Permit to dry. If the oat *glue* solution is too weak the dry pastels will crumble in your fingers. If it is to strong you will have difficulty building up the drawing since the pastel should powder and adhere to the rough surface of the pastel paper.

An alternative to the oat water is either say half a bottle of childrens' mucilage glue or two tablespoons of rice flour dissolved in a quart of very hot water. The mucilage is that amber colored syrupy school glue that comes in those funny bottles with the rubber tops which must be pierced with a scissors before the glue is used--. If the mucilage gives pastels that are too brittle and splinter or don't draw properly one or two tablespoons of honey may be added to the glue and water solution.

Crude Pastel Paper or Board
Mix up white powdered tempera paint with unflavored gelatin before it has a chance to cool and gel. Add the finest sand available and prime support. Fine sand paper painted white may also be used.

Real Pastel Recipe
De solve one ounce of crystal gum taragacnth or gum Arabic in three or four quarts of distilled water (dissolve gum crystals in a cup of warm water and then mix into the rest of the water). This solution will mold if stored without some kind of fungicide such as clove oil or Listerene(tm) mouth wash. Use this solution to make a paste out of one part pigment and one part fine chalk or kaolin clay. To make a range of tints take a portion of the previous fifty-fifty dough and mix it half and half with pure chalk dough... Repeat this process with a portion of this new lighter dough... Repeat until you have the lightest dough you desire. Roll into sticks as above.

Pastel Fixative
Skimmed milk sprayed on in light layers with a plant mistor but without permitting the paper to become significantly damp. One yolk of egg (remove yolk sac) or a teaspon of unflavored gelatin dissolved in a quart of water may also be used but is slightly more inclined to cause shiny patches.

All my eyes on a face look to astonished is it just the way I look at things or is it the way I am drawing?

If your error is the one I see most commonly with students it is the following: You are showing whites above and bellow the iris.

The upper eyelid rests on or below the top of the pupil and the lower eyelid rests just above the bottom of the iris so the pupil iris should be a circle with its top and bottom cut across by the eyelids unless the subject is astonished or terrified. I draw the eye opening and then place parentheses like curves on to create the discontinuous disc of the iris... the iris then has striations leading into toward the pupil and commonly also is darker at its outer edge then across the rest of its form.

The pupil is then drawn in as the bottom say 4/5s of a smaller circle and usually a so-called trap light of gleam is added to the upper left to indicate the wetness of the eye even if such a high light isn't actually present in the scene... it is a standard convention that also indicated roundness rather than flatness for the eyeball.

Furthermore, the eyeball does not fill the space of the eye opening but is a sphere that falls short of the corners... Usually the outer corners are obscured by the eyelashes set at an oblique angle due to the curvature of the eyeball upon which the eyelid rests. The inner corner of the eye however shows distinctly that the corners are occupied by soft tissue rather than the eyeball itself... this corner is filled with the little pink ball of the tear duct (I sometimes represent this with just a circular mark of highlight... and there is a band of pink tissue that wraps around the eyeball itself immediately to the side of the tear duct. The white of the eye should be filled with a light film of gray for drawing or pink or flesh color to indicate both the ton resulting from the minute blood vessels of the eyes and the fact that it is mostly in the shade of the brow, upper lid and lashes. Seldom is the *white* the lightest areas on the face or even of the eyes... pure white should be reserved for flashes of gleam and the visible edge of the lower eyelid indicating its thickness. Most importantly for the white is that it be shade towards the corners of the eye to indicate the roundness of its surface... even in direct light the surfaces of the eye viewed obliquely by the artist will be less bright than the surfaces viewed orthogonaly.

Now the eyelids: this is a thickness of skin that falls over the eyeball and surrounding soft tissue in the eye socket. The opening has a ledge top and bottom indicating thickness although the upper is usually obscured by lashes... the upper, however, does usually indicate the slight bulge of the cornea over the iris and also casts the shadow that shows that the iris is set back from this clear surface of the eyeball. The apex of the curve of the upper eyelid usually falls above the inner edge of the iris where as the greatest dip of the lower falls toward the outer edge of the iris, this means the eye opening is far from symmetrical on either the vertical or horizontal axis. Further more the eye opening follows around the tear duct bulge on the inner edge and is thus far from having a pointy corner but rather a curved pocket set low for this budge.

The biggest error I see with lashes is setting them regularly and as a standard length rather than as irregular clumps that shorten towards the inner corner of the eye. They are curved hairs which viewed head on are clumps but on either side of the vertical axis terminate towards the corner from there origin.

Eyebrows. Get the curve of soft flesh attached to the underside of the brow before getting to the crease where the eyelid begins to lay snugly on the surface of the eyeball. The brow hair is long sparse and vertical at the middle of the face and at just in from the inner corner of the eye switches to a more densely pact configuration of diagonally running hairs meeting from top to bottom running to the outside of the face as kind of a single herringbone row.

The key to representing the eyes obliquely as in the case of say a three-quarter profile is that the sphere of the eye begins to occlude the eye opening as it turns away from you, the circles of the pupil and iris foreshorten into ellipses, and most importantly maybe, you can measure the relate apparent widths of the two eye structures , the one facing more towards you and the one facing more away.

Remember too that the eye width is a wonder full measure for determining the placement of other facial treatments... the following are norms that individuals fall on either side of:

• The eyes are set one eye-width apart and the edges of the face are half or 3/4s eye-width from their outer corner thus the face is often four or five eyes wide.
• The nose is often about one eye-width down from the corners of the eye and often one eye-width wide.
• The mouth is often half an eye-width down from the nose and half an eye-width tall and two eye-widths wide. Thus when showing the head at an oblique angle the corners of the mouth can often be found by dropping imaginary lines down from the centers of the eyes.
• The chin line which is often hard to control as it merges into the jaw line can be found by sweeping an eye-width along the bottom edge of the lower lip with the tip of the nose as an imaginary center point.

What is the golden measure?

--The Golden measure or Golden Mean can essentially be described as the division of a line where the smaller segment of the line is to the larger segment as the larger is to the whole. Used to create a rectangle, the short side is approximately 5/8's (.625) as long as the length of the longer side.

--The actual ratio can be rounded as 1:1.618. Many parts of the body are related by this proportion and it is pleasing to the eye.

Since this proportion can be roughly approximated as 1/3 (.666), the Golden Measure may also be the basis of the so-called "rule-of-thirds" which holds that the points of greatest interest and balance in a composition are at the intersections of divisions by thirds.

--The following diagrams show some of the methods for finding the true Golden Section, Golden Rectangle, and Golden Section for the Golden Rectangle for a given line.

How can I help prevent my drawings from smudging?

• You want to use fixative to stabilize the finished work.
  
• While you are working you can prevent smudging when drawing on a flat or inclined surface by using a bridge to lean the heel of your drawing hand against. They sell beautiful acrylic bridges but you can make one from a heavy yard stick or similar th ing with spacers attached to either end to keep it elevated over the work surface.
  
• On a vertical work surface a mahl stick is used... this is a rod with a soft pad at one end, optimally it is leaned against an edge of the work surface but may need to be braced against a point on the drawing.

I really want to draw people but I can't get a handle on the proportions... what would help?

• Practice, practice, practice.
  
• Draw BIG! an error of a quarter inch is devastating on an 8x10 inch drawing but of less consequence on a drawing of 18x24 inches.
  
• Try tracing photographs from fashion magazines etc. and reproductions of work you admire, this will help your hand and eye get used to the proportions and curves of the face as well as exposing you to diverse physiognomies. When your hand becomes confident you can move on to copying from these sources.
  
• To get a handle on drawing from life you can use the "drawing.html"Painter's Net"drawing.html" this is a frame set up in front of the model and strung with thread to make a grid.
  

• I recommend a frame of say 18x24 inches, a canvas stretcher may be used, this can be gridded by stringing thread over thumb tacks set into it.
  
• I recommend a grid that is four squares across and however many down... too many grid squares that are too small can lead to a lot of confusion.
  
• You should sit at some distance from the model so that you don't get conflicting information from the different vantages your two eyes will have, you must also keep a landmark feature, tip of nose for instance, lined up with a landmark grid juncture.
  
• You can now use the squares of the grid to measure features and their shapes against. For instance, the cheek, maybe its curve starts a third of the way into its square at the top but leaves a quarter of the way into its square at the bottom.
  
• You can grid you paper and transfer to it directly your observations of shape and proportion.
  

Look at the "negative space"... we have mental images of the things we can name (such as eyes) that can inadvertently influence our attempt to capture what we actually see, so try to draw the things we don't have metal models of... the shapes of the whites of the eye not the iris and pupil, the shape of the eyelids around the eye not the eye itself, the shape of the wall seen behind the cheek not the cheek itself... you will be amazed at how accurately the forms you draw around will be depicted if you work to them this way.

Beware of the "skew"! We can recognize people we've never met from a photograph of them viewed from only a single angle. This is because our mind is powerfully able to fabricate models of faces viewed head-on from images of faces originally seen at o blique angles. If we are trying to draw a sitter with their head at an angle to us and maybe tipped on an incline as people most often hold themselves, this head-on model can try to emerge in our drawing as our mind attempts to "normalize" the image. Mar k for yourself the placements and inclines of the vertical and horizontal medians of your sitter face.

Measure, measure, measure... how long is the nose relative to the eye? The sitter is looking to one side, how wide is the far cheek relative the near cheek?

Look for the shift in planes on the face... where does the forehead cut back to the temple? where does the front of the cheek cut to the side of the cheek? Even drawing a sitter head on you want to indicate the difference between the plane of the che ek that you see head-on and the side of the cheek which is actually set at an oblique angle to you. Observe how the edges where these planes meet are indicated, an abrupt shift in value? a soft transition? a shift in temperature only?

Block in the major structures before moving on to the details. You could probably recognize your mother half way down the street before any of the details of her features came into focus. You are responding to the proportion and shape of the light an d dark patterning created by light striking the structure of the face. You can achieve this view of light and dark patterning artificially by looking at your sitter with your eyes squinted up, this suppresses the details that can distract from accurate p erception of structure. Put the right features on the wrong skull and you have lesser likeness then you would with the wrong features on the right skull.

Practice, practice, practice... loosen up... don't worry if your drawings are ugly or don't look-right, just keep trying, I'm sure your thousandth effort will be somewhat better than your third.

What is contour drawing?

• Put simply, it is the tracing of the edges of forms in a scene with the eye while following along with the hand that is drawing.
  
• The hand is imagined to be linked directly to the eyes that carefully trace the edges of the forms and then of the elements within those forms. The drawings that result from this method often have a fluidity and lack of self-consciousness that is pr ized by the artist. More commonly it is used as an exercise to strengthen the skills of observation of proportion and of hand-eye coordination. Fluidity, gesture, and clarity as well as an understanding of how volume can be represented by proper outlinin g of shapes can also be improved through the exercise of contour drawing.
  
• "e;Blind contour drawings" are made without looking at the drawing surface until the drawing is complete, where as more commonly the artist glances down at the drawing when commencing to contour each new element so that placement does not become confused. Long continuous single lines are commonly used to depict each individual element of the drawing.
  
• This tracing with the eyes-and-hand of the observed image is perhaps a displacement of the old practice of tracing a scene or sitter in grease pencil on a pane of glass placed before it/them in order for the artist to better understand the particular proportions and composition evidenced in a scene.
  

What is the drawing of "negative space"?

-- This should probably be more properly called the drawing of "negative shapes".

-- Imagine you have a photo of an object or sitter placed before a background and you were to cut that object or sitter out of the image carefully following its edges... the negative space is the set of shapes that would be left of the background when th e object or sitter was removed from the scene.

-- Artists are interested in negative space for two reasons.

• First, for the sake of good composition they want the shapes that make up the negative space to be pleasantly or powerfully shaped and proportioned.
  
• Second, our mental models of things sometimes distorts our drawing of them, therefore, the proportions of a figure for instance can more accurately be rendered by drawing the negative space around it -- which is bound to be a somewhat unique and unf amiliar group of shapes -- then by tracing the shape of the figure itself. It can be seen as a matter of being forced to really observe the shapes for which we have no names as opposed to those that do such as "neck", and "cheek".

How do I fix my charcoal drawings?

Charcoal fixative spray can be expensive, I mist my drawings with Aqua Net(tm) discount hairspray. The safest and most non-toxic method is misting the drawing with an atomizer filled with skim milk or an egg yolk stirred into a quart of water. One can also mist with a warm gelatin solution made from a teaspoon of unflavored edible gelatin in a quart of water.

How do I deal with hands in my portraits? They never look right.

Observe, observe, observe. Determine the overall shape the fingers fit into (the mitten) and then cut-out their individual contours within that by finding the shapes between the fingers. Look for the curves and tapers and bulges...don't "rubber glove" them. Remember that the curves are constructed out of straight segments with rounded padding over that structure. Try drawing less rather than more than you see. Squint to filter out detail. Practice drawing just the silhouette of the hands. Look at those hands and look at how hands are painted in portraits by your favorite artists. Practice.

How can I get models to practice figure and portrait drawing/painting?

-- Take life classes at local colleges and ask the models if they do private sessions.

-- It is easier to convince people you know to rather than model nude to instead pose in leotards, body suits, or "bicycle pants" and sleavless T-shirt.

-- Use magazines and catalogs.

-- Look at talk shows on TV with the sound turned-off and try to make quick portrait sketches.

-- Look for photography books that focus on people (this is okay if you are sketching for yourself but becomes a problem if you show the work).

How do I deal with wrinkles in portraits?

• Wrinkles give character and even the sitter won't mind them if you don't over do it. Just as a picture of a brick wall with every brick drawn clearly creates monotony and we usually indicate it's nature with a few well chosen indications of bricks, so should wrinkles be reduced to the most expressive and dominant so as to avoid the over-texturing and darkening I often see in student work.
  
• The wrinkle itself is almost always a folding-in of the skin which has its adjacent protrusion on a fold above it or to it's side. Essentially we are dealing with a cylindrical volume of flesh the proceeds into a recess. Usually the scale of the drawing doesn't permit the full shading of this volume so a light line over a dark line can often give a very effective illusion of dimensionality to wrinkles in the skin. Indicating only the recesses results in the appearance that the sitter has lines drawn on them rather the skin features.
  
• Remember to get the sometimes subtle sense of sag that usually accompanies wrinkles. Look also for the combination of lumps of fatty tissue with passages of of bone and tendon visible through thin, soft, translucent skin.
  
• Look at the shape of the wrinkles, usually they are "S" shaped rather than "C" shaped... this again is the feature of the elastic skin's sagging under the effect of gravity. The lines of the face usually feature a tiny countervailing flick at the start and end of any given curve... this has to do with how the flesh is anchored to the muscles and bone.
  
• Don't forget changes of color and value that often come with changes of texture from region to region of the face.

What are "cross-hatching" and "contour shading"?

-- Hatching was developed as a means of representing intermediate shades in drawing mediums that permit only black or white marks, pure etching for instance. Shading transitions are represented by moving from dense packings of large individual marks to sparse packing of small marks... viewed from a distance this gives the illusion of graded shading.

-- When density is built up by sets of lines placed over each other at angles it is called cross hatching.

-- When hatching or cross-hatching follows the surface of the volume they shading (e.g. curve around a spherical volume) it is called contour shading.

-- When densities of dots rather than lines are used to indicate shading it is called stippling rather than hatching.

-- There are conventional shading patterns that were developed by engravers in the last century such as dot-and-lozenge, these can be seen in the portraits of dead presidents on U.S. paper money. An example of conventional shading adapted to computer work is a portrait I did using the simple MacPaint program.

What is drawing a trois crayons?

Drawing in charcoal, white chalk, and Sanguine or other red chalk. Often drawings a trois crayon are done on a cool gray paper. Aside from being quite beautiful in its own right, especially for portraits, the technique demands a certain discipline of the artist while still exploiting the potential of color. The reds should be restrained and not overdone for best effect and the cool grays of charcoal or the support can sometimes seem almost like blues if the warm of the red is used effectively.

I recommend a similar manner of painting in limited color for my students in watercolor and oil since it forces one to really think, however, with oils I recommend the additional use of yellow ocher and in watercolor white is usually omitted.

How many methods are there for blending pastels?

-- Pastels can be blended by finger, paper stump, facial tissue, Q-tip cotton swab, stale bread, rubber eraser, and/or styrofoam packing "peanuts".

-- Both chalk and oil pastels can be blended by a brush wet in either turpentine or mineral spirits but these require plenty of ventilation for safe use and are a fire hazard. This has been called "spirit medium" painting...

-- Rubbing alcohol, which is also a fire hazard, can be substituted when using chalk pastels.

-- If your paper is primed, oil pastels can be blended with sunflower or safflower oil or any other drying oil although these require some time to dry and are sometimes difficult to work over.

How can we make coloring materials and ink from soot and charcoal?

• I've never made my own lampblack from soot but the procedure is to collect the soot by suspending a metal plate over the burning untrimmed wick of an oil lamp.
  
• Making charcoal is simply a mater of burning wood, usualy hard wood or soft vines to your taste, until it is black but smothering it before it burns red hot since otherwise the carbon will burn off and you'll be left just with the fluffy white cinders. Grind about a third of a cup of charcoal into a tablespoon of gum arabic (sold in the watercolors section of the art store).
  
• Oil charcoal can be made by soaking sticks of charcoal in linseed oil... the result is an interesting drawing medium if used on primed gelatin paper. You will probably want to blot the stick and wrap it in plastic-wrap or aluminum foil before using it.
  
• Roll into sticks using wax paper, unwrap and permit to dry. Sticks made with twice the gum arabic and ground with water on a porcelain plate will produce a weak sumi ink.
  
• A waterproof ink can be made by mixing pigment into acrylic floor polish... this washes up with water but once it dries it can only be dissolved with household ammonia.
  
• A modern version of nutgall ink can be made by brewing ten bags of black tea in a cup of water and leaving overnight with a wad of non-soapy steel wool in it... this creates a ferrous tannic solution which is a permanent color that can be used as a liquid ink with the addition of gum arabic.

I have recently been looking for a source for silverpoint supplies. I have been from jewelers to craft stores looking...

I don't have personal experience with silver point but I've read that you can by a mechanical pencil and load it with jewelers silver wire of appropriate gauge. Also that some people prefer to work on a slightly toothed gesso (see Painting Page) surface rather than paper.

How can I make multiple copies of my drawings to give to friends?

• Photocopy on to nice paper and trim to a nonstandard size. Try different machines and papers. Drawings on textured paper copy up best since the shading is broken up by the tooth. The texture screens used by commercial illustrators to get around the need for halftone screening are still available, as are textured illustration boards.
  
• Gauguin used to make multiple drawings by putting homemade "carbons" (cover a tracing paper with charcoal, pastel, or oil pastel) placed between the original and new sheets of paper placed beneath it...the drawing was then traced through a top sheet of plain tracing paper, Gauguin would sandwich up to three transfer/receiver sets under one original for tracing. He also used to get up to three offsets from a single watercolor or gouache painting by sandwiching them with successive sheets of damp paper and sitting on them... he would then touch-up the week parts of the offset with direct painting.
  
• Paul Klee would roll ink up on a smooth slab, place a masking frame over it, place a fresh sheet on that, topped with a drawing that he would trace through a protective sheet of tracing paper... the result was an oil transfer drawing on the underside of the first sheet into which he would paint with watercolors.
  
• See my notes on cheap and easy printmaking.

What is a Camera Lucida?

A prism that projects a virtual image of a scene down on to the drawing surface. This image can then be traced. Try looking through an 8x10 sheet of regular glass suspended over a dark work surface at 45 degrees front to back with the lower side towards you... try strong illumination on your subject but shade the work surface... you should be able to see your scene reflected on the glass while at the same time see through it to the drawing surface on to which it can be traced. An other arrangement is a sheet of glass parallel to the drawing surface but raised above it by tall blocks to give clearance for tracing... a mirror is then suspended above it at angle such to reflect the scene on to it.

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L.C.D. (Least Common Denominator)
"Make it simple and push the content..."