drawanyway.com

It is a funny thing how you can be drawing something as famously curvy as a woman’s figure, and if you are using something like a flat pencil or a square chalk pastel (as I was for the picture above), you just cannot help but make straight lines. It’s an even stranger thing how somehow, you can represent curves nonetheless, and with what I like to believe is an interesting twist. It reminds me of those string pictures that people used to make in the Seventies: lots of straight lines forming an arc.

Clearly a sharp edge or corner on your drawing implement lends itself very well to depicting straight lines: obvious subjects might be buildings, tall grasses, and flat landscapes, but it’s worth trying it on other subjects too, just to see what happens. Just pick up a flat pencil and doodle.

The other thing about chalk pastels is, that as you use them, the sharp edge gradually becomes soft and blunt, so you can judge the difference in effect for yourself over time.