In this class, instead of focusing on how to draw specific subjects, we’ll be teaching you how to teach yourself, with some help from niji.

For the exercise attached to this lesson, see 📏 Study 1: Measuring With Your Eyes.

I spent the majority of my life stuck in the gap between these two types of pictures.

Why do my art teachers think that that left one is not “real art”? Why do my friends think that the right one is “boring”?

(Also, there’s this stuff I really didn’t understand, which everybody seemed to think was very good)

I could brush it off as a matter of “taste”, or “style”, but I wanted to know a theory of art that encompassed everything.

That’s what we’ll be teaching in this course. They’re called the “fundamentals of art,” and once you understand how they work, you can draw anything! The first half of this course will be focused on how to improve basic techniques, and the second half will focus on using those techniques to develop visual concepts. We’ll be using niji and methods from classical art together to personalize your experience!

[what do you think is happening in this picture?]

Now consider this written piece from the same era:

That, my friends, is the first SENTENCE of the Canterbury tales, written in 1387, nearly a century later after giotto’s painting. And it’s INSCRUTABLE, even to native English speakers.

But isn’t it amazing that we can understand a picture from that era perfectly?

There is an entire subreddit dedicated to discovering a classical feeling, regardless of medium.

The fundamentals: Timeless organizational concepts, on even your camera phone!

The photo above obscures information to tell a story. Leaving some things unsaid gives space for viewers to imagine.

You can see the same technique being used here by Bouguereau. He didn’t draw the arms of madonna. But he doesn’t have to: there is enough information already from the rest of the painting that she has arms.

Now you might wonder, how do we apply “abstraction” to art?

Consider this progression of sentences.

1) Exhibiting an elegant composure, she gently elevated the glass toward her mouth, enabling the opulent, crimson-colored liquid held within to make contact with her tongue, bit by bit, in deliberate and controlled fashion.

2) With delicate grace, she took small sips from a glass containing a nice merlot.

← Reality is around here →

3) She gently sipped from a glass filled with wine.

4) She savored a goblet of red.

[what do you think about these pictures? how would you order their abstract-ness?]

You’ll notice that both the most abstract and the most realistic sides of this scale feel odd. “Truth” is not necessarily what’s most realistic. It’s the version of events that the audience can believe in. The great skill of the artist is in giving the audience just enough information to work with, and letting their minds travel the rest of the way.

Real vs. abstract are two ways to swing an argument

If it looks real, then it must be real. Realism is Truth through proof.

If it stomps around like a human, then it must be loveable, like a human. Abstraction is Truth through induction.

The space between the two is the hardest to navigate: uncanny valley. The audience doesn’t know about abstraction vs. realism, but it has an instinctive sensor for when something is misplaced on the scale.

But when you nail the boundary look, the payoff is large. Here, her jacket is realistic, but her face is abstract. Combined together, this picture uses both to appeal.

So given this context, you could say that guernica is hard to approach, because it sounds something like this, if it were a text:

(This is the first sentence of James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man)

You scratch your head and wonder, what this sort of thing this sort of text is good for? (besides literary “stuff”)

Reason 1: Sometimes new ideas are not well-formed, so they are hard to understand.

This is an excerpt from Neuromancer. I can only imagine how vague this sounded back when it was written.

It turns out, vague scenes like this form the basis of of the cyberpunk genre. Over the years, artisans after the novel have slowly rendered these abstract scenes in Neuromancer into a “Truth” everyone can see.

Reason 2: People pay a lot of money to be part of an exclusive, new idea, so they look for ideas that purposefully exclude other people. (This seems like a funny concept, but it’s a well accepted idea when it comes to fine art.) Picasso himself was known to be a very good salesman, on top of being a good artist.

Of course, these are examples at the liminal boundary; most art style is dictated by its purpose.

These are two concepts that have the same underlying principles, but say two very different things.

So don’t worry about developing “style”. Peel away the veneer of “style” and learn the ways to organize visual information. No matter what it looks like, at its very core, it’s just subjects, verbs, and objects. Instead of the message of the text, or even the way that the text is written, let’s learn to love the way that language sounds. Once you do that, you can draw anything!

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