14-Day Beginner Series - What Is “Drawing”

Hi, I am Mackenzie Swenson and welcome to day five of the 14-day Beginner Series with the Artist's Academy. Today, we're gonna be asking the question, what is drawing? And you probably think you know what drawing is and you do because drawing is just the actual verb for when you put pencil to paper, right? But the way we're gonna be talking about it today isn't exactly that. We're going to continue on that same kind of theme of these three constituent elements, these three tools within composition these three elements of drawing or of painting and drawing, right, drawing, value and color. And we're gonna focus in on the drawing part today. And so when I talk about drawing as a tool within your art practice, what I'm talking about is any boundary between one object and another object. The boundary between where my hand runs into my shirt visually, right? The boundary between, you know, two different blocks of color if we're working on an abstract piece. So really any place where there is a distinction, a solid distinction between one thing and the next. So if we are just looking at drawing we can really simplify that down to lines. So lines are the language of drawing and lines can look a lot of different ways but when we're just looking at this tool of drawing we are getting rid of color, we're getting rid of value. We're, you know, darks and lights. We're just looking at how we create those distinctions between spaces. So what we're gonna do to dig a little more deeply into this concept of drawing in isolation, without thinking about all the other complications is I'm going to go back to some of these paintings that we looked at yesterday and just focus on these top ones within this range, where we're looking at drawing and I'm gonna take my beautiful bronze Sharpie and I'm going to go through and find. I've got a piece of transparency over each of these images, so you can see, right. And I'm gonna use those to go over and really explore all of the different ways that drawing shows up in each of these images. So I'll, you know, if you'll remember we have our spectrum, right. From simple to complex. And so here, this is pretty easy, right. And I know it's probably a little hard to see right now but I promise we'll fix that, but we've got a line here. So that's one boundary, right? And then we've got a little line here. This is like kind of debatable. I mean, since there's so few of them we'll just kind of throw that in there. Then with this Sorolla painting, "Madre" we've got this back here. I'm kind of gonna just let all of this stuff blend into the background 'cause it's not super important and it's not like super distinct, like this is a very clear distinction. These are kind of like just images or not images, but little aberrations within the boundary. So then here, we've got this shape of the head and then the separation of the hair from the face. And then we've got the little baby and then here it's crazy. I mean, again, this is a lesson in simplicity but even where the comforter runs into the pillow you really don't have. It's all very diffused. So done, simple drawing. So now what we're looking at is a very, very rough description of what I would say is the pure drawing element of each of these images. Again, this, I just did like a little section. So you could imagine the same level of drawing complexity extrapolating out to the rest of this painting or this little transparency and same here. I just did this one corner but you can see how, when you simplify the image and strip all of the other components away you really just get this bare bones drawing piece. So, and which really comes down to line. So that is how you can identify this drawing tool for yourself. It's all about lines. So the thing that I like to keep in mind when I'm working with lines is again, just thinking about it in terms of these different kind of ends of a spectrum. So lines can be soft or hard. So if we come back over here these are very soft lines down here. This right here is a little bit harder but nothing in this image is a really hard line. Whereas if we come over here and we look at just this very very precise cutout nature of some of the lines in here and also here, you have the other end of the spectrum. Right? Soft, hard lines. You also have long lines and short lines and long lines tend to have more of like if you think in terms of music, like a legato feel, a very sweeping, lyrical feel to them. And short lines tend to be very choppy, very like, you know and have more of a staccato feel to them. Lines can be curved or they can be straight. So curved lines definitely go again more in that like kind of sweeping, you know, there's a dynamic energy to them, but it's much more graceful. And then straight lines tend to be, you know a little bit more harsh. And then when it comes to actual like line quality you can have thicker lines and thinner lines. And then you can have lines that have a little bit more texture to them. This is more of a materials thing. So like the graphite pencils I usually use are typically very smooth lines. Whereas with my General's charcoal pencil that is a little bit more of like a textured line. So it has like a little micro concrete kind of a feel. There's little like pieces of grit and it's got more of a texturey feel to it. So those are some of the ways you can balance and play with the lines you use and for today's prompts and exercise, what I want you to do is take anything in the room that you're sitting in, right? It could be your computer, it could be a coffee cup, it could be a pen. It could be a window. It could be your hand. I used to draw my hand all the time. I was like, well, it's, I guess this is right here. So I can only draw left hands, but you can draw anything. And I just want you to focus on drawing it with lines, just use lines. And then the other thing that I want you to do is take one page in your sketchbook or a little square or section that you, you kind of cut off or like section off and just check in with like, what's your head space like right now? Are you bored? Are you anxious? Are you, you know like just kind of chill and content? Are you excited? You know, wherever you're at right now I want you to fill that little square or page or whatever it is with lines that you feel like, you know, convey whatever it is that your mental space is right now. So, yeah, just those two things. Playing really just with this line component, this drawing component. And then if you wanna get really crazy, this is actually a really fun exercise. So, you know, get yourself a thing of transparencies and you know, print out a couple images of things you like or I bet you could do it on Photoshop, you know put a layer on there and, and play around with it. And yeah, like it's... It's a very versatile tool and can look like a lot of different things. So I hope that you found this segment today helpful and looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.