Value Drawing

We spent the last few weeks working on value drawing. This is when you use different tones of shade to create a realistic 3-dimensional drawing. The idea is to not draw the lines of the outer edges, but to allow the image to emerge by focusing on the different shades of light and darkness. This has been a very difficult few weeks for me, which is also why I haven't posted anything until now.

We began by only drawing the dark areas of the figure. We were to blend the dark parts of the figure in with the dark parts of the background. The idea is to create a stark contrast between the light and the dark. The idea is also to not treat the figure as something different from the background, but to only see light and dark.




In these next couple of drawings I was supposed to try and use 5 different shades of gray. We used charcoal to draw and fill in the darkest areas and an eraser to create the light areas.

The problem with just trying to fill in the dark parts without first drawing some lines or markers where the figure should be is that I quickly lost track of proportions. The model in this picture is supposed to be laying down, but the figure just looks awkward.









I had a very hard time creating the middle values (shades). The dark parts just looked completely dark. But drawing a big dark area just makes it look 2-D. It was easier to draw the body, because the shadows show the curves of the muscle and bones. On the wall behind the figure however, I really couldn't see any differences in the shades or texture. It was very hard to make it look realistic, and not just a big block of color.












I became frustrated fairly quickly. This time it was so much harder to get out of that mental block. I didn't have a technique; I didn't really know what he was talking about; and I was disappointed with myself. All this negative energy kept coming out of me..."I hate this," I thought..."I just wanna die..." I'd grumble. And clearly, these thoughts were not helping me improve. I forced my way through, went at it in anger and frustrating....I was nearing tears.






This was a homework assignment. I started to see a little bit more of the differences in value. The black couch was not just a big black object. The light shining on it created a glow, and I tried to express that. Still, I could not capture enough of the middle colors to create a more realistic drawing.

I was stuck while other people were progressing rapidly. I went from being praised for my line drawings to being criticized.

The funny thing was that I started to notice that the people who did not do so well on the line drawings were doing much better with value drawing. And then those of us who had done better with line drawings were feeling frustrating and running into a wall with this method.



Last Wednesday we started doing value drawing with charcoal pencils. Rather than using a thick piece of charcoal to cover the dark spots, we used a pencil to go over an area with lines. I don't have some of my drawings from class because they were left in class. Overall, it was still kind of frustrating in class, but I was starting to make headway.

The next three drawings are from a homework assignment I just did, creating shades with only charcoal pencil and an eraser. The three below shows the process of this drawing.

This is a self portrait, as I am finding it harder and harder to get anyone to sit for me for so long. Since it's a self portrait, I was able to work on it longer.

Notice how I used lines to cover the largest dark areas and slowly began to shade in the darker areas.


































To get to this stage of the drawing, it took me 3 hours! And it still doesn't look finished, but at least I got to a point where I feel fairly satisfied with my progress and ability. I think I finally found a way to draw the values without outlining.

The picture is far from perfect or complete. I have proportion problems and the background still looks rather 2-dimensional. But at least I feel okay with it now. I don't know what he's going to say tomorrow during critique, but I'm feeling a little less frustrated at least.

Method to the Madness

Today I asked him if there was a process to all of this. I was feeling frustrated jumping from one thing to another, practicing one skill meticulously, only to abandon it all together. The past two days we've abandoned drawing the contours of the figures all together, and are expected to draw from the interior. Build the drawing from the inside, he said. To answer my question, he said, that there was method to the madness.

Every day we begin with these gesture drawings. This week we had a new model. Although she is thin and small, she had curvier features than the previous two models. Her poses were also more sensual and less angular. Her movements seemed womanly in that classical sense.



















This week we practiced more with lines. We did gesture drawings using the tips of our charcoal. How do I show form without drawing the contours?





































This drawing was the beginning of a series of frustrating attempts. This was a long pose and we were asked to fill out the body with lines while not focusing on the contours. It seems nearly impossible to move away from thinking about the body in that way, trying to ignore that obvious line separating the body from its background.















If the body is supposed to take shape just based on a series of lines, then what kinds of lines would give it shape? I began to imagine the muscles running underneath her skin, how they weave together to give her form.






































And today I left class with this. I'm not even sure where it came from. I was still struggling; frustrated, I told him that I was confused. He came and made a few marks on my paper. He explained that it's not just the outer lines that I should be paying attention to, but the lines going all over the surface of the body......

Hmmm....if the my index finger were the tip of a charcoal pencil, and if I were to run my finger over her body, where would it go? Where would it explore? I began at her neck, and traced my way down to the collar bone, where shadows made triangular shapes, and down the sternum and under the breast, where the curves lead the way to her areola. What an intimate process, to study the curves and bends of this person's body, to follow every inch and crevice.


I began to see the shadows creating shapes on her body. I began to see how the shadows move with the curve of her muscles and the sharpness of her bones.

Her face was the most interesting part to tackle. I grew up drawing faces, especially profiles, but none like this one. They were always generic, like the template of how a face is supposed to be drawn. From forehead to nose to lips.

This time I went from bottom to top. I followed the lines from her chin to her lips, her cheekbone, her nose, the bags under here eyes, the shape of her eye socket underneath the skin...

I found it by letting go. I didn't draw how I think it should be drawn. I didn't have an idea of how it should look. Don't draw how you want it to look; just draw how it looks.

I really felt like I made a breakthrough today. I don't know if these lines will make any sense to anyone else, but I'm starting to look at people differently now. I started to study the structure of the faces of everyone I talked to today. I looked at how the shadows and indentations gave tell-tale signs of the features underneath.

I guess I saw the method to the madness.

A Frustrating Lesson

Monday's class had left me confident and energetic. I knew what I could achieve as long as I maintained my energy and sense of adventure. But something was amiss on Wednesday. Even after the gesture drawing warm-ups, I felt slow and clumsy, like writing block when the words refused to flow from my consciousness to my fingertips. Here, the images did not translate. Maybe it was the loss of the sense of urgency, like on Monday when we had to do line drawings very quickly.

On Wednesday we had longer sessions. The model posed for 20 to 40 minutes at a time. We had to sketch the gesture with vine charcoal, using the thick end, very quickly, within 30 seconds. Then we were asked to draw the contour of her body. We imagined that we were ants crawling slowly over the outline of the model, and our hands followed in suite. An important aspect of this exercise was to not just draw, let's say, an arm. Not to consciously register that it was an arm we were drawing so that we do not use our logical side to draw what we "think" or "know" an arm looks like. Instead, we were to really look at the lines along the arm and the curves along the uneven surface of the flesh.

What made this particularly hard was that while I concentrated on the contours, I lost track of the proportions. It was difficult trying to combine all the techniques into one. Shane also mentioned that the act of measuring the model was simply a technique to get us to start internalizing the proportions.


Wednesday's drawings also led to more "realistic" images than those on Monday. The more realistic a drawing is supposed to look, the easier it is to spot the flaws, especially pertaining to proportion. This one for example, made her look too narrow, and the arm is too thin.

It's easier to like Monday's drawings because of their abstract look. They can fool you to think that they are somehow "good."

I also began to tune into other people's frustrations. I heard sighs and "hmms." People twisted their mouths, wrinkled their noses, and shifted their weight. It seemed that we had hit a communal block in our art.



I also noticed that after drawing the male model, whose body was sinuous with muscles and bones, the female model was much smoother and much rounder. These smooth lines had a harder time taking shape on my paper. She's a thin woman, but after paying so much attention to the uneven contour of her body, she began to look fat and flabby. It made me wonder if all those pale fat bodies of women painted long ago were really actually rather thin bodies.



One off day. It was bound to happen. Like writing or jogging, these things don't just happen every day of the week. Art is so interesting! It's not purely cerebral, like the act of writing. The hard part about writing is most of the time, the words are already there, floating in my subconscious, and it sounds good in my mind, but the act of transcribing these words onto paper is like a strange kind of fishing. There in my mind, I have all the words that I need, floating and bobbing in the ripples of my subconscious, but sometimes I'm too slow, and I can't catch the words before they sink below the surface. Sometimes I'm too clumsy, and the words refuse to be pieced together, like an unfinished puzzle.

Drawing on the other hand is so much more physical. The cerebral aspect only enters as judgment: Is it proportionate? Does the arm angle this way or that way? Where do the shadows fall? But more so, it is the movement of my hand that creates a drawing. So much of it seems to be stored in the muscles and joints. If my hand is not familiar with this type of movement, then I lack balance and lose control, like a wobbly yoga pose. There also seems to be an element of faith, to trust the movement of your hand. To go for it. And if it's wrong, try it again. There's a need for so much more of a balance between logical judgment and well, I suppose you can just call it intuition. It's a struggle between control and letting go.

Day 2: Exploration of Styles

A quick note on the models. Day 1 we had a female model. She was lanky and skinny. You could see the ripples of her rib cage and the tiny bumps of her spine. I suspected that she, herself, was an artist, because she was very well aware of her poses. Exaggerated and angled, it seemed that every limb and every curve of her body lined up with other parts of her body perfectly. It was almost as if she was doing it on purpose to produce perfect 90 degree, 45 degree, 30 degree angles.

On Day 2 we had a male model. He, too, was lanky and thin. You could see his tiny muscles weaving in and out of his body. He bothered me a little as a model, not because he's a man, but because he stopped to talk to us. He gave small suggestions as though he too was teaching. This was strange to me, because during the first day, I had gotten used to the model, being up there as nothing but an object. With so much attention to the body, you start to forget that it is a person up there. He also moved and sighed when the poses lasted a little too long--it was as if he was fighting against this objectification.


On day 2 I loosened up. I approached the exercises with full force, without fear. I knew at this point that there was no point in attempting "good" art. These wereull force and simply exercises, and here was my opportunity to explore. After the gesture drawings, which we do at the beginning of every class, our teacher Shane asked us to now use the pointed side of our charcoal. We were to look at the lines of the body--not just the contours, but every line weaving in and out of the body.

In the drawing above, and the one shown here, we had to draw without looking at our paper and just looking at the model. We also could not take our charcoal off the paper. The idea was really to look at the model, pay more attention to our subject than what's on our paper and just let our hands respond to what our eyes see.

After this, we were allowed to look at our paper again and draw the next pose. Still, we used the pointy end, with a focus on lines.






I'm kind of proud of these two pictures. They're not great or anything, but they're extremely different from the way I am used to drawing. It was like something went over me, and I just went nuts on the lines, inside and out, curving and criss-crossing every which way.

What's more exciting is that I saw my images evolving within a matter of 2 days. And the styles start to kind of resemble those I've seen in art books and museums.


A word on the penis: Surprisingly I was a little shy and avoided drawing the penis at first. I didn't want to be staring at it for so long! Then it clearly became unavoidable, and it became just another set of lines, another object.





On to contour drawing. Next we were asked to combine gesture drawing with line drawing, but this time, paying more attention to the contours of the body. The one of the man sitting up was easier than the laying down pose. I enjoyed drawing the back. I found the laying down pose difficult and awkward.




















Drawing is like yoga. It is an act of meditation. You act with intention, yet you free your mind of everything. You let go. Your eyes crawl along the body, and your arm responds. Your only focus is the shape, the angles, the length and width of that person before you. And sometimes you go into the unknown. It's intimidating; it's scary; it could utterly shatter your self-confidence. The unknown is drawing the fingers, the toes, the awkward curves of the body that you are not used to. These three hours every Monday and Wednesday are the best hours I've spent in a very long time.

Some Examples

Here is an example of gesture drawing. Keep in mind that the pose was held for only 30 seconds long. The idea is to get us not to concentrate so much on what makes a "good" drawing, but just trying to capture the movement in the body. With broad strokes, we had to show the most exaggerated angles. We did this for maybe an hour, to the point that my arm was soar. It was literally a warm up exercise to get our blood flowing, and to liberate our minds from the constraints of previously held beliefs of what made a good drawing. The exercise also broke down skill differentiation in the class. Everyone was pushed for time, and everyone's drawings were reduced to pretty much stick figures. Even so, everyone had a different style to their stick figures. Some were more rounded, and others were edgier. It was easy to see the beauty in every one of these abstract figures.

Following this very free and energetic practice of gesture drawing was a rather slow and controlled exercise in measuring. This is a self-portrait done at home:

This exercise required meticulous measurements. In contrast to gesture drawing the act was slow and deliberate, requiring great concentration--or a different kind of concentration.

In class, when I discovered that my drawing was still turning out disproportioned regardless of the meticulous measurements, I realized that it would never be down to an exact measurement. The idea of coupling this exercise with the rapid gesture drawing was to learn balance between the two. I had to keep in mind the proportions and be able to eventually internalize it without losing the wild and dramatic nature of creating the image.




I had much going through my mind that first day of class. I began to relate this process to the experience of life itself. There is, on the one hand, freedom and energy, the unexplainable ability to create an image simply through exploration. And then there's effort towards precision, there's me thinking that if I can break the process down into explainable terms like units of measurement, that I'd be able to create good art. But there really is no "how to" to art--I think, there are tactics and techniques, but it is learned purely through exploration. And most importantly, one must have humility and courage.

Starting from the beginning

Last Wednesday was the first day of my figure drawing class. It was the first university level art class I have ever taken. I was confronted with many unfamiliar things that day, like maneuvering through campus with an over-sized sketch pad and drawing board, adjusting the metal easel in the classroom, and seeing a live, nude model before me. And I confronted these things with a mask of assurance, an immature act of not asking questions, not wanting to seem ignorant.

I was confronted with the familiar feeling of intimidation too, like the large blank piece of paper before me, the uncertain movements of my hand as I am forced to commit the markings of a line or curve onto paper. Then there was the fear that everyone else would be better than me, not wanting others to see my pathetic attempts...forgetting that I am there to learn, not to express some sort of natural talent.

And it was also liberating. Our first exercise was called "gesture drawing." The model changed poses every 30 seconds to 1 minute, and within that short amount of time we were to draw the whole body, emphasizing only the most expressive actions. My first instinct, of course was to draw the only way I knew how, drawing the contours of the body, creating an outline of the figure. But there just wasn't time to do that. There especially wasn't time to think meticulously about how to get it down on paper just right. There was only time to react, to take in the most dramatic movements of the pose. I had to commit within that short amount of time, and there was no worrying about how it looked. This resulted in a lot of stick figures at first.

And it was liberating. With the speed of the changing gestures, my whole arm had to move quickly from one stroke to the next. My pulse quickened and my blood rushed through my chest, into my shoulder, down my forearm, and into my fingertips. I began to break out of old ideas about drawing--or how a drawing begins--and focused solely on the most important lines of the figure. I was being freed of old concepts and entered a new way of looking at the body, of drawing the body; it took us back to the bare minimum.

The class continued like this, from fear to freedom to intense concentration. After the warm-up exercises of gesture drawing, we entered a long sustained practice of measuring the body and making markings on our page. This caused me to take meticulous measurements from head to toe, until I became utterly frustrated at how inaccurate and distorted my drawing was. It was then that I realized that it was impossible to obtain accuracy just by measuring with my pencil from a distance. No one is asking for precision. It's not supposed to be a science, but an approximation. So much of it still depends on the judgment of my eyes.

After that first day of drawing class, I went home thinking that the act of creating art is representative of life. It is about liberating ourselves from our long-held beliefs. It is about being adventurous, exploring to the far reaches of the page with dark lines, knowing that we can go back and reshape it. It is about not being afraid to commit, to start something, knowing full well that it will not be perfect. And it is about balance, about being able to move between precision and approximation.

This is going to be an interesting summer as I explore the human body with charcoals and pencils, or rather, explore art through the human form.