How to draw

"Drawing is the expression of form". This is quoting from Harold Speeds "The practice and science of drawing" (1917).

This determines how you approach drawing. The last year and a half the implications have started to dawn on me and I think my drawing is improving a lot because of it!

I would like to share my thoughts on this in a few posts. This is as much for my benefit as yours, since I need to organize my thoughts in writing.

To begin with, return to the basic forms. The cube, the ball, the cylinder and the cone. These are familiar from a lot of drawing books, and I think there is a lot to draw (!) from studying these.

What makes the impression of form more convincing is good use of light and shadow, perspective, foreshortening, overlapping forms, scale and a sense of where objects are situated in an imaginary space. All this can be studied from the four basic forms.

In this drawing I have placed all four forms in direct light. Notice where the light is brightest and where the shadow is darkest. The transition from light to shadow is quite sudden. The shaded area should all be darker than any part of the light area. The cast shadow is darkest, as it does not receive any reflected light.

To start a drawing well is extremely important. A lot of things go into a drawing but I want to show how you might begin a drawing - of anything. I think a method that really works should not have to be changed much with different subject matter. I write this partly to sort my thoughts out, and I know this is the same information you get in other books. What might be different here is just how much I think can be gleaned from just studying these forms, and the way we draw them. I will try to show what I mean in the next post. Stay tuned.