Drawing Tips

Creating Depth in Drawing

Those of you who have been on my drawing courses know that if you really want to create interesting and imaginative drawings you have to push yourself out of your own comfort zone. It is important to set yourself challenges, whether it is to draw something much quicker that you would normally, or simply to take on something you haven’t attempted before. Your drawing will stagnate if you keep drawing the things you can draw well in the same old way you have always drawn them. So if you like drawing bowls of flowers for example, why not get into the flower head and draw what is inside there twice the size you would have normally drawn the bowl and the flowers combined. If you really want to challenge your drawing here are a few ideas that might help:

• When drawing something that is really difficult like a clenched hand try to analyse the object in terms of simple shapes: the palm of the hand is a square, each finger is made of three cylinders and there is a large oval shape at the base of the thumb. Get theses simple object to work first by drawing them faintly, them boldly draw the hand on top. Remember Picasso’s famous remark, ‘I don’t draw what I see, I draw what I know’. Know what you are drawing and it will look more convincing.

• Try not to draw everything with outline, try suggesting some areas by the use of an edge instead. For example, if you were drawing a bent leg you might suggest the top, curved part of the thigh by shading the background up to the thigh itself, therefore creating an edge. The lower part of the thigh might be suggested by line. Variety makes the drawing interesting.

• Try to ensure you have a wide range of tones in the drawing if this is appropriate, The best way to work this out is to squint at your drawing, this cuts out the half tones and you just see the light and darks. If your drawing all looks the same tone, you will need to make some areas darker of lighter depending on what is required.

• When drawing still life objects make sure you know where eye level is. Eye level always corresponds to your own eye level. Objects will look less significant (important) if the eye level is high on the page and we are looking down at the objects. You often notice old paintings of peasants often use a high eye level, because we ‘look down’ on the peasant class. If the eye level is low on the page we look up at the objects, they will appear more significant and therefore important. You will find for example that paintings of Napoleon invariably have low eye levels because it is intended the view looks up to the Emperor. It was also a good way of disguising the fact he was only 5’ 2” tall.

Try to always the create a variety of marks in your drawings, use the side if the pencil lead as much as it’s point, combine a graphite stick with pencil. Use a variety of hard and soft pencils. Experiment.

Finally, when drawing a group of objects, when not try drawing the spaces around and between the objects rather than the objects themselves, this really forces you to look carefully and to understand what is going on.

Here is a simple method for creating depth in drawings (and paintings for that matter) by using tone. If you are lucky enough to be able to stand in the countryside and look towards the horizon you will notice a number of things useful for drawing and painting. Perhaps the most important is the fact that as everything recedes towards the horizon they become smaller, lighter in tone and less detailed. Objects have softer edges and the difference between the lightest lights and the darkest darks becomes much narrower as you get closer to the horizon.

With these observations in mind, start a landscape drawing. When you reach the point that you wish to add tone try this idea. Look in the foreground and select what you consider to be the very darkest tone. Scribble this tone in a very small part of your foreground and now look to the middle ground, again look for the darkest tone and scribble this tone as described above. Do the same with the background. You should end up with three small areas of tone, the darkest being in the foreground and the lightest one in the background.

Now you have a key to begin adding all your other tones, because you now know that no tone in the middle ground can be darker that the middle ground tone you have drawn already so every tone has to be lighter. Do the same with the background and foreground. You should end up with a whole series fo tones gradually getting lighter as they recede into the background. You can use this idea for painting also.