Drawing Perspectives
Dear Sam,
I am resoundingly incompetent as a doodler. Straight lines end up curvy, curvy lines end up straight, the faces I draw have ears coming out of cheeks and what looks like curly brackets for noses, and trees look like large stalks of broccoli with wires sticking out at one end. I thought that the inability to draw was just another shameful and unchangeable trait of mine, like sing-shouting profanities in a falsetto when stressed or eating pizza crust-first, but I think this one might actually be changeable. I brought a book called Learn How to Draw What You See out here and I’ve been working on it a little bit every day.
It starts with drawing a straight line. A lot of straight lines. Pages and pages and pages of straight lines. Practice ’til you can’t practice no mo’, then practice a little mo’. It’s all about moving your arm and not your wrist, as the book tells me.
Once you’ve mastered lines, you move onto lesson 2: boxes. This is where things get really interesting. Seriously.
Boxes force you to deal with the issue of perspective. A box appears mighty different depending on if you’re looking at it from above, or below, or if it’s directly in front of you. Suddenly, you have to think about where you are in relation to the drawing. Your drawings are not only created at your hand, but at your eye. It might sound obvious, but I had never considered that you draw subjects in the form that they appear from where you stand.
That’s been my problem with drawing up until now: I’ve never had any relationship with what I’ve doodled. My role as the doodler had been to regurgitate what I think are the correct marks that correspond to the thing I’m drawing — a face has two oblong ovals on the sides of the head; a tree has wiry branches sticking out of the top of the trunk. But those general shapes change drastically depending on where I am in relation to the subject. A face directly in front of me might have the ears almost entirely obscured. A tree’s branches will look different from immediately beneath it than from 50 feet away.
Love,
Mike
