The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (22 page)

In this lesson, we are working on the perception of edges as one of the component skills of drawing. Recall that there are four others and together these five components make up the whole skill of drawing:

Before you begin: Please read through all of the instructions before starting your drawing. In the next section I will define and fully explain the Picture Plane. For now, you will be simply using it. Just follow the instructions.

If you are like most of my students, you would simply not know how to go about doing that. It seems far too difficult to draw this three-dimensional form, with its parts moving toward you in space. You would hardly know where to start. The viewfinders and plastic Picture Plane will help you get started.

Place the plastic Picture Plane on a plain sheet of paper so that you can clearly see what you have drawn. I can predict with confidence that you will be amazed. With relatively little effort, you have accomplished one of the truly difficult tasks in drawing—drawing the human hand in foreshortened view. Great artists in the past have practiced drawing hands over and over. Observe the examples by Albrecht Dürer and Vincent Van Gogh, Figures 6-6 and 6-7.

How did you accomplish this so easily? The answer, of course, is that you did what a trained artist does: You “copied” what you saw on the picture-plane—in this instance, an actual plastic plane. I fully define and explain the Picture Plane in the next section. For now, you are simply using it. I have found that the explanation makes more sense after students have used the plastic plane.

For further practice: I suggest that you erase your felt-tip pen drawing from the Picture Plane with a damp tissue and do several more, with your hand in a different position each time. Try for the really “hard” views—the more complicated the better. Oddly enough, the flat hand is the hardest to draw; a complex position is actually easier. Therefore, arrange your hand with the fingers curved, entwined, crossed, fist clenched, whatever. Try to include some foreshortening. Remember, the more you practice each of these exercises, the faster you will progress. Save your last (or best) drawing for the next exercise.

This brings us to a crucial question—that is, an all-important question in terms of your understanding: What is drawing?

The quick answer: Drawing is “copying” what you see on the picture-plane. In the drawing you did just now, your own hand in foreshortened view, you “copied” the “flattened” image of your hand that you “saw” on the plastic Picture Plane.

And now, a more complete answer to the question, “What is drawing?”

In art, the concept of “the picture plane” is extremely abstract and difficult to explain, and even more difficult to comprehend. But this concept is one of the most important keys to learning to draw, so stay with me. I’ll try to be clear.

The picture plane is a mental concept. See this in your “mind’s eye”: the picture plane is an imaginary transparent plane, like a framed window, that is always hanging out in front of the artist’s face, always parallel to the “plane” of the artist’s two eyes. If the artist turns, the plane also turns. What the artist sees “on the plane” actually extends back into the distance. But the plane enables the artist to “see” the scene as though it were magically smashed flat on the back of the clear glass plane—like a photograph, in a sense. Put another way, the 3-D image behind the framed “window” is converted to a 2-D (flat) image. The artist then “copies” what is seen “on the plane” onto the flat drawing paper.

This trick of the artist’s mind, so difficult to describe, is even more difficult for beginning students to discover on their own. In this course, therefore, you need an actual picture plane (your plastic Picture Plane) and actual window frames (the Viewfinders).

These devices seem to work like magic in causing students to “get” what drawing is—that is, to understand the fundamental nature of drawing perceived objects or persons.

To further help beginners in drawing, I asked you to draw crosshairs on your sheet of plastic (the plastic Picture Plane). These two “grid” lines represent vertical and horizontal, the two constants that the artist absolutely depends on to assess relation ships. Early on in my classes, I used a grid of many lines, but I found that students were counting up—“two spaces over and three down.” This is just the kind of L-mode activity we didn’t want. I then reduced the “grid” lines to one vertical and one horizontal and found that was sufficient.