Art Class Adventures I
Image by: Deleece Cook
Drawing Class #1 - Shapes & The Line of Action
Last Thursday night was my first adult, basics drawing class. It was held in the community center in Windsor and taught by Sergio Mazzotta who was able to teach us a great deal. And much to my surprise, by the end of the 2-hour class, I managed to produce something that resembled actual human figure drawing. Who would have thought!
We started by making figures out of shapes: A boxy, super-hero, tough looking figure entirely of square shapes, a woman made out of triangles, or my scary looking bug-man made out of triangle shapes. Turns out, everything we see and draw can be broken down into structural shapes and forms. The structural shapes can be described as rectangles, ovals, triangles, and other simple shapes. Practicing recognizing these structural shapes when looking at art and random objects in nature, and breaking down even the most complex images allows us to correctly visualize the basic structure and, for me, makes it less intimidating to draw.
According to Al Gury and his Foundations of Drawing, you can put all the secondary individual differences like body mass, fat deposits, and muscle definition aside because the core structure of a body part is the same across the board “the general shape of an upper arm from shoulder to elbow or a thigh from him to knee is a tapered rectangle.” And this is true not only in figure drawing but also in landscape – everything can be broken down to simple shapes.
As if that wasn’t enough to make our minds explode, we learned about the magic line of action, and the difference this line makes in drawing. The concept is so simple, yet it makes so much difference in a drawing. It is the first mark in any drawing, it is like an S-curve that runs down the spine. The more exaggerated that curve is, the more attitude, movement and life the drawing has.
All of the actions our bodies take follow that S curve and the lack of gesture and the curve can make the form look really stiff and unnatural. We tested this by drawing figures with stiff, straight lines and then switched using S lines. Every time we used s line and exaggerated the movement, the drawings of our stick figures came alive. And even though you could not see facial expressions only simple shapes – you could tell the feeling of the stick figure: sadness, defeat, jubilation, anger – it was truly remarkable.
But there are more of these, as Al Gury calls, gesture lines that describe the whole set of rhythms or movements through the body from top to bottom, or to the small individual movements of a particular body part. But I think the finer point of these gesture lines comes much later.
What we didn’t cover was balance and proportion which is also part of the fundamentals but he did promise we would learn that in the third or fourth class. Next class will be basics in portraits and faces and I’m looking forward to what else I will learn.
Some really good resources to practice: