Drawing Foundations in the Mystery

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” Einstein

What is Drawing

Drawing is a conscious discovery cooperating with one’s sensory awareness and imagination. It is in expressing emergent ideas through transformation insights within the subject experience leading to an intuitive way of working called the creative flow with line leading to shape and form.

Artistic Adaptation

Is freedom of creative expression: a conscious activity within an imaginative world. We are called to the Mysterious with craft and skill rooted in the Harmony of Beauty based upon Balance with Rhythm.

The Foundational Elements of Drawing 

Dot – Line – Shape - Form

1.     Dots: A mark. Dots are probes. It is the beginning of the elements of drawing. A way to begin to measure and compare. An economy, a reference of figuration, a shorthand. As a method of painting, Seurat’s Pointillism or staccato strokes in van Gough. 

·      Dot Method:  to use formally or informally to understand proportions and develop size relationships in building a solid foundation for paintings to rest upon. Tools are calipers, your instruments such as a pencil, marker, or your fingers.

2.     Line: A moving mark, a series of dots. A length greater than width moving in space.

·      A situational element, dimensional, a way to communicate intentional, using modulation for a choreographic expressive quality balancing the science and poetry.

3.     Shape: A 2-dimensional form of length and width. Love overlaps, creating an inside and outside space; is the beginning of design.

4.     Form: A 3-dimensional representation of volume with length, width, and height, revealing its external boundaries. There are 3 basic forms: cubes, spheres, and cylinders are the beginning of mathematical perspective. Each have planes with dimensions that correspond to a light source.

·      There are 5 Elements of Light in the Academy: Highlight, Direct Light, Shadow, Reflected Light, Cast Shadow

Drawing Levels

I have learned that one of the reasons why artist students don’t Sketch is because they are too critical about their drawing skills. Impressionism does not place a burden on drawing skills. Impressionism puts its value on sketching.

•      Sketches typically last seconds or a few minutes the purpose for this type of drawing is freedom. The aim here is to express your-self without preconditions associated with classic representational drawing. Sketching should be fun, relaxing, and free-flowing.

•      Studies generally are more involved and tighter than sketching. Studies can take from a few minutes to half an hour. This form of drawing is designed to present more information and in-depth expression Even though Impressionists used sketches, studies, formal drawing as well as tracings to develop ambitious studio works.

				Master Drawings
			Cartoons
		Finished Drawings
	Studies
Sketching

Of all these artistic drawing expressions, sketching as a fine art discipline in a sense is not a finished work of art. Yet, for me, sketching is the foundation for movement. It is an introspective process, the doorway connecting the conscious and subconscious.

Most often, I found when artists are suffering a creative block; it is because they have stopped sketching. Remedy: sketch, sketch, sketch and playfulness always.