Horizontals and verticals


APRILscans 005, originally uploaded by lone_goomba.

My drawing one teacher asked us to eye-ball diagonals by measuring them first with our pencil (held in front of you, against the angle in your setup that you're measuring) and then transferring that angle, held just so with your pencil, to the page.

My drawing two teacher would slap the pencil out of my hand if I tied that. Or well, at least he'd give me a look like he wanted to smack something. "Don't draw diagonal lines!" He's said many times, while flaring his eyes and nostrils for dramatic effect. Don't guess them, don't eye-ball them, don't draw them until you're more than halfway done with the drawing. followed by "you have to ARRIVE at the diagonal line!"

What he wants me to do, I'm starting to realize, is rely on horizontal and vertical lines. Which actually kind of does work a lot better.

You can kind of see in this sketch how I'm using them. It's kind of like making rough X and Y axes, as if you were making a graph, and then, measuring against a lattice of other graphs which are recording the relative positions of other landmarks, you start to Arrive at some diagonals.

still though, I'd like to say to my art department: listen guys, I know every teacher has a different style. But the art department is like a half dozen people. Can you please at least agree to teach things that the other teachers will not try to un-teach the next semester?

No comments:

Post a Comment