InTouch Magazine Articles Archive

Issue 15, February 2008

So you wish you could draw!

By Theo Michael.

If you've thought that creating a pleasing drawing or painting depends on being blessed with a divine gift you might want to think again. Drawing well is primarily a craft and as such based on rules and skills that can easily be learned by anyone who is willing to learn how to see like an artist.

Contrary to common belief creating a competent drawing has all to do with perception rather than dexterity of the drawing hand. If your handwriting is legible, not beautiful or stylish, but simply decipherable you certainly have the right prerequisites to become a competent drawer or painter. But what does this all mean to be able to perceive things as they are? Let me try to explain.
Imagine a cartoon figure being propelled at high speed towards a thin wall and actually crashing through it, leaving behind a perfectly recognisable outline of its shape. This shape left behind in the wall is the contour outline of your cartoon figure. If you were to draw just the outline of this shape it would be called a contour drawing or a contour line drawing, it defines the outer edges of your object.
However the edge of an object, or the line that you have just drawn, is always the border of two things simultaneously. It is always a shared boundary, in this case not only the outline of the cartoon figure, but also the outline of a distinct shape of the background. In art and design this background shape is called the negative space.
Let's say you are going to draw a chair, recognising the shapes that make up the background are equally as important as the shape of the chair itself. Instead of copying the outline of the chair, try to draw the outline of all the negative spaces for a change, such as the spaces between the backrest, or the spaces between the legs.

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