learning to draw means learning to see!

Learning to draw means learning to see

For any art one should learn basic fundamentals!  When I am working on figure drawing I practice anatomy.  When I am doing cityscapes I study perspective.  When I am training on color, I do exercises on values and colours with the Munsell color chart. And I repeat these exercises.

       Learning to draw means learning to see; and learning to see accurately.  “Educate the eye before you educate the hand. The hand will become cunning soon enough when the eye has learned to see, whereas if the hand be educated before the eye one may never see.”   — Carolus-Duran(1880) .  

       You should avoid the feeling that we can’t exhibit practice work.  That we can’t show it the same way we would a finished drawing.  For me, I am much more satisfied with practice work than a full painting    because it makes me feel that I’ve received some food for the inner soul through lots of learning.  Also, some buyers took my practice work — they found some spark in it. 

        After doing some art work one should identify which area needs to be improved, then practice that skill  deliberately and get fit for another painting. 

What I practice…

        At present I am following the book by Arthur Wesley Dow — “Composition: Understanding Line, Notan and Color”.  There are a lot of exercises in it... https://archive.org/details/compositionserie00dowauoft/page/n6  

You can download it for free or you can buy at Amazon. I use it to do some exercises regularly.  At present I am working through exercises on line and composition.  I work with pencil, charcoal, and with ink. The line practice must go slowly and carefully as you observe how the line is coming and how the line is growing.  Your hand should be controlled by force of will. Practice means giving training to hands and eyes. If you see great masters’ drawings you can find the quality and power of line.

Daily I put the date on my exercise papers, and after practicing for one week,  I will check back and compare whether my line has improved or not. This type of checking is very important. If I am getting the same old lines it means I am not practicing deliberately! 

The next book is “Freehand Drawing: A Primer” by Philip Thiel. He suggests to practice from life.  Draw anything and everything — draw whatever is in front of you. Learn to look, there are wonderful drawing ideas all around you, just waiting to be sketched. Find interesting objects to draw and work from life.Boxes, rope, wire, chairs, hands, hand tools, shoes, flowers, leaves, branches, still life, etc.

Another practice work is to copy Bargue plates.

Charles Bargue designed the Cours de Dessin, published between 1866 and 1871 in collaboration with Jean-Léon Gérôme. It is one of the most influential classical drawing courses and consists of 197 lithographs printed on individual sheets that describe a learning process that begins with the study of the drawings of the great masters, continues with the copying of plaster casts, and concludes with the drawing of the human figure from nature.  

 I just started first two plates. I am still learning. I found these exercises on some blogs and YouTube. And if I find any reliable online course I want to join it.  

  Famous artist  Van Gogh wrote to his younger brother, Theo, in 1881: ”Careful study and the constant and repeated copying of Bargue’s exercises have given me an insight into figure drawing. I have learned to measure and to see and to look for the broad outlines, so that, thank God, what seemed utterly impossible to me before is gradually becoming possible now. I no longer stand as helpless before nature as I used to do.”

If you search in Google you will find a lot of sites and tutorials on this, so it’s a sign that the significance of classic realism is growing !

Recently I bought the book “An Accurate Eye”  By Darren Rousar. I want to start this also. There are so many good books and resources for drawing practice.  Find them through reliable sources and start practicing!  

My advice for the people who want to draw, self-taught artists, and women who want to work and learn from home, for those who want to draw again after long gap and for emerging artists is that anything can be possible with practice. Just do it.  Take very limited time, start small, do it with focus, repeat the same exercise, check whether your line has improved or not. Again, go for it.

I have given some links below about the command of line by the masters, line importance in the site of Google arts and culture, practicing Bargue drawings etc.