An Urban Landscape Drawing
Materials: #2 pencil
Free-flowing, fine-tipped, black-ink writing pen, such as the Sanford Uniball Micro pen
Picture Plane/Viewfinder
Felt-tip marker
Time needed: 30 to 45 minutes
Purpose of the exercise:
Since few of us have an easily accessible rural landscape available, in this exercise you will be drawing a scene more familiar to many of us, an urban landscape. This may seem an unlikely subject for a drawing because such scenes are so familiar we barely take notice of them. The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate that any scene and any subject; when lovingly viewed and carefully drawn, can be the subject of a beautiful drawing. In this drawing, you will concentrate on edges, negative spaces, relationships, and perceiving the gestalt of a perhaps unlikely subject.
1. Turn to page 132, with the printed format.
2. By automobile or on foot, explore your neighborhood or town to locate what you might describe as a truly ugly corner, full of signboards, stoplights, and storefronts.
3. Park your car (or set up a folding chair if you are on foot) near the truly ugly corner, and prepare to draw while sitting in your car or on your folding chair.
4. Use your Picture Plane/Viewfinder to frame the view. Choose a composition.
5. Choose a Basic Unit. Draw it on the plastic plane with the felt-tip marker.
6. Transfer the Basic Unit to the paper using your #2 pencil.
7. Sketch the main edges. You may use pencil, or you may start drawing directly with the pen if you wish.
8. Using line only, begin to draw the scene bounded by your Viewfinder, at first focusing mainly on the negative spaces. If you have signboards in your scene, draw the letters by drawing the negative spaces around the letters. This will unify the letterforms into the composition (if you drew the letters themselves, they would "pop out" of the composition).
9. Work from spaces to adjacent shapes, and from shapes to adjacent spaces. Use your pencil to sight angles relative to vertical and horizontal, and proportions relative to your Basic Unit. Fit the parts together as though the scene were a complex, fascinating puzzle.
10. When you have finished drawing all the edges of the shapes and spaces, you may want to use your pen or pencil to darken in some of the shapes or spaces. Alternatively, you may wish to keep the drawing as a pure line drawing.
11. When you have finished, sign and date your drawing. You may wish to add a title—Urban Landscape, An Ugly Corner, Fifth and Broadway.
Post-exercise remarks:
In this drawing, your subject—the urban landscape—was probably made up of mostly straight lines and angles, but the same drawing technique can be readily applied to other kinds of landscapes as well. Negative spaces, for example, are enormously helpful in drawing tree trunks, branches, and the spaces around clumps of leaves.
I hope this drawing convinces you that subject matter is of very little importance in drawing. Anything—an old pair of shoes, a baseball cap, a towel hung over the back of a chair, an unmade bed—can, when lovingly observed, produce a beautiful drawing and provide a sense of the gestalt.
EXERCISE
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