Associated Study: 🎎 Study 4: Paper Dolls

Thus far, we have only shown you how to “measure” drawings. For the next part of this course, we will teach you how to use those measurements to compose your own drawings. Let us show you how the three exercises you’ve learned so far can be combined to express your own concepts!

You can think of these 3 concepts we’ve taught you so far as dimensions: each dimension builds upon the foundations of the last to keep our concept organized.

It’s lovely how our brain understands the picture above without nothing to go off of except for line, isn’t it? The blank space in front of the right figure’s face even conveys smoke. It is a marvel that this is drawn in a single line. It is visual data that triggers meaning and information using only shape.

Shape is the first and primary layer of abstraction of visual data. It’s the foundation upon all the other dimensions are built. In many ways, the pursuit of a good shape is a lifelong endeavor.

When shape language is correct, the picture feels “Truthful” without adhering to the laws of “real”. For instance, if we think rationally about the picture above, we’d say that there’s no way for the woman’s legs to be connected to her body at that angle. But it doesn’t matter. Our eyeballs want to believe in the pleasing shapes.

It works on rendered pieces, too.

Shape design is agnostic to style. For example, using the straight lines of swords to direct eyeball movement is a timeless composition.

The purpose of a good shape is to direct the viewer’s gaze.

Try to trace invisible lines through your drawing: If the invisible lines flow well, then the shape is good. If they stutter and break off into nowhere, then the shape is not great. When the big shapes are set up right, it makes the central argument of the picture clear. With all the swords and arms directing such strong compositions as the ones above, you can have a soldier picking his nose with his other arm somewhere in that crowd, and nobody would notice.

Look at how Mucha organized the shapes in this drawing below.

Notice the difference between the dress on the right and the dress on the left. A stuttery connection captured in real life has turned into a smooth highway for our eyeballs. The reference photo is an already a pretty nice shape, but Mucha’s visual reorganization is LAVISH.

Ironically, by this principle of moving eyeballs, exaggerated shots are the easiest to compose from imagination. Oftentimes new artists are intimidated by “action shots”, instead, spending their time studying things like muscle groups and high-fidelity rendering. While those things lend themselves well to homework exercises because they offer a very visible concrete answer, they are also the hardest things to master, because stuttery lines demand a high level of fidelity to fool the human brain.

The lines divide our picture into areas. The easiest way to organize areas is by size. Our eyeballs typically recognize large, medium, and small.

For example. in this sketch, the background, midground, and foreground are separated into feature sizes of large → medium/small → large with surgical precision. By ensuring that the cylinders with giant foreheads are the only elements in this piece at that size, it makes them stand out alone as the protagonists. When shapes are the same size, they fight with each other for attention. When they are differently-sized and placed to contrast each other, they create vectors that push and pull our eyeballs through the picture.

A complicated shape stops eyeballs, and a simple one makes eyeballs go faster.

It’s difficult to draw monsters: For us to believe in them, we have to trick the human brain to make sense of visual data that doesn’t exist. In this circumstance, a simplified shape goes a long way into persuading us that the object is “True”.

We don’t know who or what the monster is, but his simple lines make it easy to read what he is doing, and we can believe in the monster, if we can believe what he is doing. You can see the power of the shape in the artist’s draft below: the picture was already mapped out from the beginning.

Compare this alligator to the one later in the lecture by Sargent. Observe how Frazetta’s exaggeration of shape sold us on the “Truth” of this alligator, even though it bears very little resemblance to a real alligator

In the dimension above, we used pure shape to organize information. Now, we add another dimension: how dark a shape is. A well-organized value structure tells you what is happening in the painting, even without rendering.

The concept is this: bring objects of similar brightness even closer together in brightness, until they form a mass of even more similar brightness. (this is the generalized concept of what we were doing in lesson 2 with the terminator line)

Value refers to how bright and dark the areas are in relation to each other.

Sargent’s watercolors are a brilliant display of value control: the regions of dark and light are well placed. To finish the picture, he simply added some details on top of an already strong organization of light and shadow.

Notice how the regions of dark and light are well connected and grouped together: nothing jumps out and interrupts the invisible trek of our eyeballs.

(They had contract marriage stories back in the day too, haha.)

Grouping together values makes short work of even complex crowd scenes, like this:

This dimension alluded me for the longest time, simply because it was hard to see.

The organization idea is simple: when a transition is harsh between two regions of different value, it draws our attention. When a transition is soft between two regions of different value, it fades into the background.

Here, the artist is using a masterful control of edge to lead our eyes to the most important place in the picture, letting the less important parts fall back.

Just like shape, edges can be used to style abstract concepts beyond the stretch of our semantic perception.

Edge is a concept which also exists in stylized works: the highest place of contrast here sits in a magnificently placed eye highlight.

Incidentally, when you hear social media artists lament that the WIP gets a lot more attention than the finished piece, it’s not simply the coincidental nature of a fickle audience. Uncontrolled edges pollute the purity of the concept more quickly than any other dimension, and when the concept becomes hazy in an arena where a viewer only has a few seconds to devote to every piece, the audience will lose interest.

Edges are hard to navigate. Of all the dimensions, even more so than color, this one is the only one that you must render out fully to feel.

We won’t be prescribing cast drawings in this class, but you are free to try them out and feel the effects of “edge”

Just kidding. We just spent last lecture talking about color: we will return to the wonderful world of lighting at a later date.

Isn’t it amazing? The process of drawing is the process of organizing your thinking. Each dimension of thought builds upon the last to form a robust argument.

Oftentimes, we like to jump to rendering, because it makes things pretty, but carefully checking the hierarchy of each dimension while you are working on it will save you a lot of grief in the long run.

Crafting a good picture, like a good writing essay, is making sure that the language doesn’t get in the way of your idea: before we can present the idea to our audience, it starts with organizing the concept well in our own heads.

Always evaluate every detail you are working on in the greater context, and you will avoid killing your concept as you render it.

During his time, Sargent was criticized for his “undisciplined” technique when it came to portraiture. But quite simply: he did not paint an extra stroke because not an extra stroke was needed.

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