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How I Learned to Draw

There are a lot of people who are afraid of drawing, perhaps because they are intimidated by a talented friend or have been told by a teacher or loved one that they canʻt draw. What I think is really happening is that many people get swamped by the details they face. They see the task of drawing a face as insurmountable and resort to drawing the symbols for a face passed down as something more akin to writing. A stick figure is very much a pictograph or hieroglyph.

I donʻt remember making stick figures. My earliest memories of drawing is from kindergarten. Back then all the boys were drawing Japanese superheros  Kikaida, Go Ranger, and Kamen Raider V3. I used simple shapes. Hands were balls. The body looked something like a paper doll cut out. I became increasingly frustrated as time wore on because of the difficulty of rendering the human figure.

In the third grade we had a guest artist come to class. She painted a hand for us by painting an oval with some broad strokes for fingers. This was the first time I saw some one block out a shape and create line as an edge. Up to this point I was thinking linearly. This was also the first time I saw someone mix a flesh tone with paint. For me that was an epiphany. Suddenly hands were not so mysterious.

A year later I was placed into an art class at the Honolulu Academy of Art (now the Honolulu Museum of Art). I got to miss English so I was overjoyed.  One of the projects was embossing aluminum foil. I chose to do a T-Rex. When I looked in a how-to book, T was drawn as a pear. It was hear that I learned to see shape when drawing an object. The object is not important to a drawing. The idea of a human is not important. It is only the SHAPES that are important.

 

Many people are intimidated by drawing the human figure. By divorcing yourself from all the baggage associated with what it is to be human (or any other subject) and concentrating on only shape as defined by light and dark, the figure is demystified and subsequently easier to illustrate.

In college we examined the masterworks of the artists of the past we see the idea of shape based painting being played out by zooming in on a detail of a hand, a nose, or a kerchief. Rembrandt exemplifies the idea of shape based painting. As a whole his work is convincingly photographic. Magnified it is a bit of shock to see the painting is really truly an abstraction composed of hundreds of thousands of layers of amorphous shapes.

Drawing class further reinforced the idea  of shapes through several methods.  First, we had to use fat materials like the broads side of a piece of charcoal. Instead of small movements of the fingers, drawings were accomplished by moving the entire arm if not the body as a whole. Next was the concept of drawing positive and negative shapes.

Through these methods I was able to divorce myself from the symbolic representation of objects and look for the shapes that make up the details of an object. Normally, we use line to illustrate shape. You will further notice that shapes have edges which are lines. Shapes define line. The conjunction of shapes is used to create the illusion of form. By rendering simple shapes, any object, no matter how detailed, can be rendered as well as you wish with a bit of patience and effort.

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