The Drawing Book: a review

Sarah Simblet, The Drawing Book. London, Dorling Kindersley Ltd., 2005.

Most drawing books feature the work of an individual author and works, very often drawing “classics”, by others. This is an impressive book, both in its large format (larger than A4 and more than 260 pages) and its comprehensive sweep of contemporary aspects of drawing and sketching. There’s a heady mix of materials, unusual drawings and modern takes on conventional subject matter. Other artists’ drawings she uses are noticeably different from other similar instructional books.  

The initial chapter, covering traditional content such as drawing books and paper, sets the scene for a journey of personal discovery via sketching and drawing. Highlights for me were the accessible sketches of insects in a variety of pen and inks (p.34-37), an excellent chapter on Plants and Gardens and the variety of approaches demonstrated in Architecture. 

Objects & Instruments feeds directly into the trend for object drawing and there you’ll find Composition, Negative Space and Tonality matched with the distinctly innovative such as drawing with wire. The pages on Hands and Feet make you want to draw them, especially if imitating her work in compressed charcoal and ‘bracelet shading’ on toned paper. Modern fashion is included in the chapter on Costume (including a double-spread on shoes!). Abstract Line certainly pushes the envelope, exploring semi-abstraction and collage. It’s traditional to end instructional drawing books with drawing from the imagination and Simblet links this content with brushes and brushwork.

All the traditional genres are there, but there’s a modern twist on them all. An extremely well-disciplined student who follows each of the directives to their logical conclusion (e.g. learning about perspective by drawing imaginary spaces drifting into the distance, or exploring ‘writing time’ or ‘Chants and Prayers”) will benefit enormously from the experience. Those with less rigour will simply be inspired by the munificence of mark making on display.

A book full of passion, exploring the imaginary and the fictitious through drawing.

Great Garden Sketchabout #26: trees, bromeliads, flying foxes

9 April, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney. Trees, Lower Gardens. Derwent graphite pencils; Staedtler watercolour pencils.  We put the training in colour today at the Bookbinding & Sketching Workshop (Session 5), by tackling the area around the Macquarie Wall. Governor Lachlan Macquarie and Francis Greenway have been front-of-mind this week in re-reading The Fatal Shore of Robert Hughes as background to Georgian architecture both in Sydney (St James Church and nearby convict barracks) and Windsor; I’ve also been deciphering a photograph of 1892 taken from the GPO tower, extending from Martin Place (not yet extended through to Macquarie Street) and the not-yet-built Sydney Hospital, St Stephen’s Church, the NSW parliament buildings right through to the NSW Conservatorium crenellated towers, the rooftop of NSW Government House and the Lands Department building). The photo was taken just ten years after the fall of the Palace and some forty years before similar city landscapes were drawn from the North Shore by Lloyd Rees. Ernest Watson talks a lot about copying from old black-and-white photos as ways of dealing with both tone and composition and I wouldn’t mind including some sort of collage from a copy of the b&w photo combined with some green colour denoting the cards, mimicking the coloured postcard of the Garden’s Vintage Views display.

From 8am, some pre-sketching of the Silk Floss tree in the Palace Gardens section, as well as some rapid gestural sketching of flying foxes trying to sleep. Not only do the foxes sleep fitfully but they have the habit of spinning around on their branches. They also seem to enjoy bugging each other. I well know the cantakerous sleeping associated with working the night shift! Very like gestural sketches, prior to a long pose at life drawing classes. I’m not sure how many sessions it will take to get the likeness right! Today’s bright, sunny weather does allow the sketcher to see more of the browns/oranges of their bodies; on previous wet days, they cover themselves up much more completely with their charcoal grey wings. Looking up into rain in previous weeks produced even less convincing results! I will persist because I think a contemporary Gardens sketchbook really ought to include these animals, which have made their presence felt not in terms of ripping the trees apart, but from their smell and noisy shrieking as well. I’m quietly appalled at the number of trees they inhabit; stripping the leaves and branches of tall palm trees to trees, they seem to move to ones very much closer to ground level.

I was looking for shade from which to draw and benches along the Macquarie Wall came in handy. My limited range of pencils were not up to capturing the wondrous blue-greens of much of the vegetation under filtered light, but that’s okay. As with all these subjects, it’s always possible to come back at another time. I applied the water with a brush, not a water-brush, so there was less overall control, but I love the unpredictability of the medium. Since colour was the focus, I moved off the graphite more quickly than usual. Today’s biggest lesson for me personally was an accident: a touch of green used next to chocolate brown pencil, which under water, becomes a wonderful, vague contrast of green and red. I knew straight away that this technique could be applied to some nearby bromeliads!

I guessed exactly how little pencil work to add to the paper, allowing the water to do all the work. Variety of marks and differing pace of line. Very limited palette: just violet, pale green and yellow, with brown watercolor pencil line instead of graphite. This is an entirely new way of working for me: less time looking at my own work and more timing observing the subject. I’ll re-do sometime with a better eye to the plant’s geometry. With the KISS ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid!’ principle uppermost, I could go on to do many more of the plants in this part of the Gardens, an unusual number seem to be the palest greys and blue-greens. Less in a ‘photographic’, hyper-realist desire to get the detail right, and more about the overall impression or feeling.  Time now to invest in some watercolour paper alongside colour-sketching on this very white 110gsm sketchbook paper. I watch my colleagues use their water-brushes with much less abandon and more judicious painterly strokes.

Here’s a re-statement of the original sketch and as is often the case in ‘translated’ sketches, a lot of the original spontaneity was lost, even though a lot of the geometry was corrected. I lost my brown watercolour pencil on location yesterday and you can see that a replacement black hasn’t done the trick.

An excellent day of intense visual concentration, but I ran out of puff after lunch. In the background to today’s field work was not just a heightened sense of colour, but some strict botanical illustration by a workshop colleague done in Polychromos pencils; I was expecting exotic rare flowers, so was heartened to see humble things like seed chillis, capsicums, aubergines, pumpkins (which stay they way they are for ages!) and even insects bought over the Internet. Imagining these works on full-sized paper takes me back to my calligraphy days. I’ve been aware this week of the National Library’s former exhibition devoted to State library jewels, including scientific illustration from the likes of Raper and the recently-UN heritage listed sketchbook of fishes by William B. Gould, Tasmanian convict. This puts yet another sketchbook into the limelight, alongside the 72 stuffed birds from the Macleay Museum which won this year’s Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize. Lastly, more of the short documentaries on television, Perfect House, featuring architectural illustrationist Ptolemy Dean (who uses a 0.5 Microliner pen and double-spreads of an A4-sized sketchbook, watercolours delivered later over an interesting ‘signature’ of wavy lines whenever he draws a ‘straight’ one).

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One fine day…

Landscape

A second drawing in a H pencil, with summary over-drawing in a B, at a local park during my lunch break. The subject matter only came to me after seeing another sketching blog yesterday. I’d thought my children’s playground installation was multicoloured and was surprised to note it was all a light blue; I must have eaten lunch beside it a dozen times already, which just goes to show much I observe my environment. I note Borromini Bear talking about exploiting the ‘spread’ across two pages of the sketchbook, an important aspect of design/composition, as opposed to the vignette style and the typical Renaissance disegno sketch of subject plus accompanying detail nearby. I like the thematic link in sketches of playground and cemetery, beween the locus for the child and the deceased, presented in a cold, artificial manner, devoid of vegetation or trees and the natural world (though I’m particularly drawn in Rookwood Necropolis between the nexus of tombs and nearby straight lines of trees, especially squat paperbarks, and dividing mown lawns). 

Plan: repeat this two-page spread at subsequent on-site sessions, but add watercolour washes, perhaps with a single colour wash used in both drawings.

Seascape

A copy in Copi markers (grey and brown) from page 104 of Moira Huntly. Done in relation to boats moored locally on the Cooks River near Sydney Airport. I need to keep copying this Huntly then transfer the same techniques to on-site sketching. I’ve already “absorbed completely” the important notion of the boat’s reflection in the water: no boat without reflection! I’ve misplaced the grey but the brown still works well after years of inactivity.

Plan: Next sketchbook, move to Moleskine Watercolour journal and markers in light blue, indigo dark blue, grey, black and tan brown.

On copying

I’m wary of my daily regimen of sketching/drawing/scanning/uploading teetering under the weight of more pressing daily concerns, so will ‘get in early’ by posting a sketch done in the past. I have long copied the likes of Raphael and others from the Italian Renaissance but I am just as fierce about copying from the Moderns. Nothwithstanding that for security reasons (sketchers lumped in with delusional canvas-slashers!) sketching is no longer permitted in public galleries, there is plenty to copy from the public domain. I am pleased to see some sketching/drawing available from the Internet for download and later personal copying on paper; understandably the best work is copyright-restricted and unable to be re-sketched personally away from the computer screen. Copying others’ work is all about broadening one’s repertoire of mark-making, moving beyond one’s comfort zone and habit. We know interesting drawings/sketches deploy a wide variety of marks – drapery, stubble, etc.

Plan: identify from a ‘real’ drawing as wide a range of marks as possible. Reproduce each of the marks on a grid of 1cm squares.

On colleagues’ work

As we know, depicting children in art these days is almost dead. Certainly verboten. As outre, twisted and taboo as female students in 19th century art schools trying to attend life drawing classes. Classical training in getting the dimensions of children’s heads right is now extinct. I couln’t possibly reproduce here versions of Mantegna’s putti. Thus it has been strange to see children depicted in some sketching weblogs. Perhaps the rule of public persecution only applies to Established Artists and not amateurs. On the Urban Sketcher’s website, I have enjoyed Lok Jansen’s omae, gestural faces probably sketched on the Tokyo metro, with a similar Continuous Line technique (don’t take the pen/pencil off the page at all) used by Charles Reid in the under-drawing for his watercolours.

Plan: Lacking live models, copy portraits from photos using the Continuous Line technique.

References

Camesasca, Ettore. Mantegna. Series: The Library of Great Masters. Milan, SCALA Istituto Fotografico Editoriale S.p.A, 1992.

On sketching, scanning and digital dissemination

MATERIALS

Okay, so I’m discovering everyone else in this business uses markers or waterproof ink and I’m using lead pencils. Part of me says that if the humble 2B pencil worked for Lloyd Rees and Sydney Ure Smith so well last century, then that should be sufficient. I look at my scans though and, regardless of resolution, none of the detail is being picked up. Do I go with the (digital) flow and move over to the materials used by urban sketchers and the like which can be reproduced perfectly via digital scans? I’ve scanned at Medium Size several A4 sketches (scan res upped to several MB each), older ones using sanguine/conte on coloured paper and they obviously scrub up better than 2B pencil. I’ll keep hunting around the Net for sketchers who use sanguine/conte on coloured paper, perhaps exploiting the contrast between ‘old’ techniques and new subject matter. In the meantime, I’m rifling through my pencils, pencils, crayons, chalks and in a dramatic move to wet media, have (on the basis of superb info provided by Borromini Bear in her Flickr photos) ordered a w/colour field set.

 

FIGURE DRAWINGS

Today’s figure drawing involved the current Forearm Foreshortened but this time got back to coloured chalks/conte crayons which moved around (especially with white added) like “paint”. And, again resisting my sketching DNA, a contour-only in 2B pencil which digitally translates into a soft blue.

 

PLEIN AIR & BOTANICAL

Today’s plein air involved the local boats at Holmbeach Avenue, with Wolli Creek residential towers in the background; I ought to continue the scene on the facing page! I followed one sketcher’s advice via the Net of ‘leading into’ the buildings in the mid- and background via a ‘link’ in the foreground. I’ve long been an admirer of Moira Huntly so threw in the ‘whimsical’ effect of the front fence in the immediate foreground as an after thought. As with all drawing, it’s all about a variety of marks to create visual interest, especially important in landscape where the propensity is to focus solely on horizontals with contrasting verticals.

An experiment also with a native groundcover, with grey-green leaves and woody stem like rosemary and curlicue buds and flowers in the softest lemon and fuschia pink – to be re-attempted in original colours!