The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (51 page)

I believe you’ll agree that ugliness was transformed into something approaching beauty in the student’s drawing. This is another instance of the transformative power of the artist’s way of seeing. One of the great paradoxes of art is that subject matter is not of prime importance in creating beauty.

Directions for the cityscape:

We have explored complementary color schemes in the exercises above. Two additional ways of arranging harmonious color are monochromatic schemes and analogous schemes.

Monochromatic color, meaning variations of a single hue, is an interesting experiment with color. Choose a colored paper and use all the pencils you have in hues related to that color. In her
Umbrella Still Life
(Figure 11-17), student Laura Wright used variations on a theme of orange—the color orange in all its transformations, from dark brown to the pale orange of the paper.

Analogous color is an arrangement of hues close to one another on the color wheel—red, orange, and yellow; blue, blue-green, and green, for example. Student Ken Ludwig’s drawing,
Large Stuffed Eagle
(Figure 11-18), is an analogous arrangement of red, red-orange, yellow-orange, and pink chalk rubbed into white paper. (Using pastel chalk is explained in the next section.) Ken used pen and black India ink in short, hatched strokes to draw the eagle. You might try this combination of a rubbed chalk ground (which again supplies the middle value) and ink lines for a variety of subjects—animals, birds, flowers—to practice analogous color.

Your next purchase should be a set of pastels, which are pure pigments pressed into round or square chalks (sometimes called “pastel crayons”) using a minimum of binder. You can buy a basic set of twelve chalks (ten hues plus black and white) or a larger set of up to one hundred hues. But be assured that the small basic set is sufficient for these first exercises.

I must warn you that pastels have some serious drawbacks. They are quite soft and break easily. They rub off on your hands and clothes, spread colored dust wafting through the air, and produce a drawing that is extremely fragile.

But there is a positive side. Pastels are almost pure pigment, and the colors are lovely—as clear and brilliant as oil paints. Pastels, in fact, are the drawing medium closest to painting. Pastel drawings are often referred to as “pastel paintings.”

Because pastels come in a wide range of pure and mixed hues, a student beginning in color can experience something very close to painting without the difficulties encountered in mixing paints on a palette, contending with turpentine, stretching canvas, and dealing with other technical problems of painting.

For many reasons, therefore, pastels are an ideal medium to provide a transitional midpoint between drawing and painting. For an example of the proximity of pastels to painting, look at the exquisite pastel paintings by the eighteenth-century French artist Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin in Figures 11-9 and 11-10. Chardin, often called the “artists’ artist,” has portrayed himself in his green eyeshade and his wife in her demure headdress. Examine Chardin’s marvelous use of color, bold yet restrained. These two drawings are masterpieces of portraiture and of pastel painting.

One of the main differences between exercises with colored pencil and pastel drawing is in the quantity of applied color relative to the ground. Student Gary Berberet’s
Self-Por trait
(Figure 11-16) illustrates expanded use of color to construct the entire image.

For the exercise that follows, I will use as my model the pastel drawing
Head of a Young Girl,
by the French painter Odilon Redon (Figure 11-15). Redon’s free use of pastel color in the negative space of the drawing will inspire you to experiment with this medium.

Redon’s mystical and lyrical work spanned the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. His pastel drawings have been linked to the writing of Poe, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, and all are connected conceptually to Surrealism, a period in early twentieth-century art that focused on dream symbolism. The yellow lizard in Redon’s drawing, juxtaposed to the dreamlike serenity of the girl’s head, is reminiscent of Surrealist symbolism.

Before you begin, please read all of the instructions.

A special point: Look at your three pale pastels and decide which is the darkest (lowest) in value, which is in the middle, and which is the lightest. Then use the lowest-value chalk for the first layer of hatches, the middle for the next, and the lightest for the last and final layer of hatches. This sequencing of colors from dark first to light last is the sequencing required for most painting mediums (with the exception of watercolor, which is usually worked from light first to dark last). In working with pastels, the dark-to-light sequencing helps to keep your colors clear and fresh. Reversing this sequence can result in muddy color. This point will help you to see why practice with pastels eases the transition to painting.

Start your drawing now. You will need about an hour and perhaps a bit more to complete the drawing. Be sure to give your model a rest at midpoint in the hour! Try to work without interruption, and ask your model not to converse with you while you are drawing. Your R-mode needs to be completely free of distraction.

When you have finished: Pin up your drawing, stand back, and regard your work. Check the balance of the color. Then turn your drawing upside down and check the color again. If any hue seems to pop out of the composition, somehow not locked into the color arrangement, some slight adjustment needs to be made. The color may need to be repeated somewhere, or it may need darkening, lightening, or dulling (by lightly hatching a bit of the complement over the hue). Have faith in your judgment and in your R-mode ability to perceive coherence—and incoherence. When the color is right, you will know it!

In this book, we have covered the basic skills of drawing: from edges to negative spaces to relationships to lights and shadows to color in drawing. These skills will lead you directly to the world of painting and new ways of expressing yourself through art.

Drawings stand on their own as works of art, and paintings stand on their own as works of art. But drawing also becomes part of painting—the underpinning, so to speak—just as language skills become the underpinning of poetry and literature. So, drawing merges with painting and a new direction beckons. Your journey has only just begun.

12

The Zen of Drawing: Drawing Out the Artist Within