Drawing without an eraser
Check out the misjudged shoulder position here: this guy might have had a slight stoop, but he wasn’t the hunchback of Notre Dame.
As many of you know, I am returning to drawing after quite a long time away. I still have a large number of dusty old art materials bundled into a drawer, and it still excites me just a little bit to open that drawer up and see what’s in there: bottles of ink, pens, pastels, strange pencils that I picked up in art shops because I liked the look of them, like oil sticks and flat pencil crayons and a graphite stick.
The other day, I was rooting around that same drawer trying to find a rubber (or eraser to all you American readers). Actually, it was when I was about to start tackling the picture that goes with this post. I was a bit unsure about how I was going to draw the subject, and my natural inclination was to reach for a pencil and rubber.
Well, this reminded me of something all my art teachers repeated again and again: ‘Don’t rub anything out’. They’d especially say it when we were life-drawing. We’d all groan, of course, because what that meant to us was that we were supposed to get the drawing right first time. If we didn’t, our mistakes would be on display.
But that wasn’t what the teacher was getting at, at all. Now I am a bit older, I can look back and see that the reasons for not using a rubber are actually quite good ones:
- If you are a timid artist, you will be rubbing out lines before you have even started properly. Just forging on ahead gives you some of the benefits of drawing to a time limit - your drawings will be more confident, and you won’t have time to stop and think.
- With the right sort of pencil, you don’t actually need a rubber. With most pencils, you can make a faint mark or a strong one. So, if you sketch your subject out with faint lines, and some of them are wrong, it doesn’t matter, you can just put stronger lines in the right place. These are the lines the viewer will see. And actually, this sort of approach, where the final picture is surrounded by incorrect lines, is quite ‘painterly’. In other words, it’s the sort of thing professional artists do quite a lot, so, ironically, it will lend your image some credibility!
- If you are the analytical type, you can assess which lines were wrong, and which are typical of the kind of faults you often make. Once you’ve recognised these, you can start to put them right.
Today’s task is to draw something and make sure there is no rubber at hand (or, if you’re drawing on your computer, resist the urge to use the ‘undo’ button). Of course, if you’re using a pen or another medium that cannot be erased, you have already given yourself very little choice in the matter. But let’s see what happens.
Posted: July 10th, 2007 under Confidence, Technique.
Comments: 7
7 Comments
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Oil sticks! I got given loads of these when I started my uni course; haven’t touched them since. I have no idea how to use oil paints or anything like that, so I got a bit scared. But yeah, you have to peel back the edge bit cos it goes all hard. They look fun. Maybe i’ll make a concerted effort to use them next semester.
And yeah, my life drawing teacher is constantly telling us this, don’t rub out your lines. But I tend to agree with you (and him), it does look quite good. In fact I’ve got into the habit now that if my drawing actually goes right and I havent got many mistake lines, I add random bits after :P Which is a bit strange. Hmmm.
I definately think that mistake lines look best when you’re drawing people. It can make them have random ghost arms, or gives them more sense of movement.
Actually a great example of this is a life drawing/portrait of his wife by the illustrator James Jean:
http://processrecess.com/devtools/blog_fullsize/FA07F1_fullsize.JPG
You can see how he changed the position of the face a few times. I absolutely love this quality about this particular sketch.
(A WARNING: If you ever want to attempt drawing again, don’t go looking at this guy’s work. I swear to you, he’s soem kind of alien/genius. His work is amazing. He’ll make you want to give up and be a chain-smoking barmaid or something :P Having said that, I bet everyone will look at his work now. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, k?)
P.s sorry for the essay-type comment. And yes I am on del.icio.us now, you twisted my arm. Username - RacheLewis (only 1 L, look how clever I am)
P.p.s Ooo site changes… I like
a) I think with any new medium, the key is to just have fun and try them out until they become familiar and then you can start envisionaging what you can do with them.
b) That picture is a superb and wonderful example and also beautiful in its own right. You’re doing all my work for me here! Gorgeous. Sometimes I wish my husband would draw, and that he’d draw me so beautifully.
c) I will link to you on Delicious forthwith! Only, most of my links are very boring work-related ones.
d) Guess what, all the site changes were by mistake.. :( Which is why you can’t subscribe to comments or reply to a comment any more… but a strange by-product is that everything looks better! :)
e) Talking of strange things, the weiderst thing happened to me in photoshop. I was trying to select an area of a picture and got an error message, so I forgot all about it - but the next time I went in to select a brush, there was my selection - as a brush!! I tell you this because you were explaining to me how to save brushes and it looks like I did it by mistake. God knows how, I usually sigh at my dad when he tells me things like this have ‘just happened’ to him!
Oh yeah, I thought the changes were supposed to be like that. This explains why my Rss feed seems to have stopped working? Strange. are you going to try to change it back?
Haha, yes , i have no idea how you did that, must have pressed some kind of shortcut? Clever :P Well I’m halfway through my tutorial, do you want it emailed to you or shall I post it on my blog and you can link to it whenever you want?
Oh balls, has it (the rss feed)? It was working for me this morning..:( I’ll try and have a look at it tonight.
Erm, it’d be lovely either way - I don’t mind if you’d rather have it on your own blog, tho’ of course I will give you full credit either way!
Oh nevermind it’s back now. Must have just been a temporary problem.
This is something I’ve been working on, to make myself a bit bolder about drawing. I haven’t had a good example up till now; I often start so faintly that it hardly shows that I didn’t use a rubber. In fact sometimes my finished picture hardly shows! But here’s one that shows a few of those exploratory lines as well as the ones I was trying to get down.
I love the composition of that picture.