Pyle on Tone and Edges

Many of you have asked for more classical art teachings from obscure primary sources. So today and tomorrow, I’d like to share some rare nuggets from Howard Pyle.

Mr. Pyle didn’t write down a lot of theories because he was suspicious about systems or formulas. He believed that pictures were made by inspiration, not by analysis. “The student learns rules,” he said. "But all the rules in the world never make a picture.”

Fortunately he did speak about his ideas of picturemaking during class sessions at the Brandywine school. Several of his students wrote down what he said. One good set of notes comes from W.H.D. Koerner, who became a notable illustrator of western subjects.

TONE

Keep your picture simple in tone. The fewer the tones the simpler and better your picture. The more tones in a picture the harder [it is] to do.

If a face against the light seems dark, it sometimes can be lightened by darkening the hair or hat.

If you feel your white isn’t light enough, make it still lighter.

Keep pretty much same tone quality in flesh and white cloth except in the shadows.

A white coat in a room must be a trifle darker than your white light out of doors.

Forget your drawing and stick to tone. If you get balled up on a part of picture, go back to the tone and don’t rely on drawing.

EDGES

The study of edges is the main thing, outside of tones.

One way to get a spiritual feeling in a certain figure [is to] keep everything softer in that figure than in other parts of picture and let light radiate away from it.

Tomorrow we’ll look at Koerner’s notes from Pyle regarding light and shadow.

Vine Growth

Next time you draw a vine wrapping around a branch, here are a couple things to keep in mind.
Each type of vine follows different genetic rules. A bittersweet vine always winds counterclockwise as it ascends.

This large bittersweet vine was once a small spiraling tendril wrapping around a young sapling. Later the vine vaulted to a bigger tree, and kept getting thicker until it was far thicker than its original host. Finally the small host sapling died and rotted away, leaving the vine looking like a telephone cord.

This real telephone cord wraps in the opposite direction, clockwise as it ascends.

As with the telephone cord, the wisteria vine wraps clockwise as it goes up, unlike the bittersweet vine we saw earlier, which wrapped counterclockwise.



In this YouTube video of a morning glory vine, you can see the leading tendril trying to find a host as it spins counterclockwise.

Memorial Day

On this Memorial Day: honors to those who have served in war, and also to those who have acted bravely through other means to avert war.

The sketch is from the West Point Museum, on the grounds of the U.S. Military Academy in New York, one of the largest collections of militaria. Link to their website.

Fedkiw’s Math and Magic

Ron Fedkiw, who works in the computer science department at Stanford University, has helped develop the software to solve a lot of complex 3-D modeling challenges.

How does hair behave when you shake your head, for example? There are complex interactions at the micro and macro levels.

Fedkiw’s analytical process involves math and physics concepts like topology, fluid dynamics, and “robust invertible quasistatic simulations.”


Never since the Renaissance has the field of visual art been exposed to such fresh new thinking that blends so many different disciplines.

For those of us who work in traditional media, the digital work of Fedkiw and his colleagues is a stimulating inspiration, because it helps us understand more about what we’re drawing and painting.
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See a full gallery of Ron Fedkiw’s works here.

The hair was created with the help of Andrew Selle and Michael Lentine
Fire with Jeong-Mo Hong, Tamar Shinar, Duc Nguyen and Henrik Jensen.

Menzel: Beyond Appearances

He was small in stature, only four feet, six inches tall. When he was young, his peers called him the “Little Mushroom.” When he got mad and fought back they called him the “Poisonous Mushroom.”

Although he was intelligent and witty, he spoke gruffly, not wanting to be pitied. He kept to himself and never married. (Portrait of Menzel by Boldini).

Adolph von Menzel (1815-1905) did have one constant companion: his sketchbook. An acquaintance recalled:

“In his overcoat he had eight pockets, which were partially filled with sketchbooks, and he could not comprehend that there are artists who make the smallest outings without having a sketchbook in their pocket. On the lower left side of his coat, an especially large pocket was installed, just large enough to hold a leather case, which held a pad, a couple of shading stumps and a gum eraser.”

He was self-taught. He didn’t care for the idealization of the academies. He wanted to draw things as they were. He worked in all media, but his drawings, generally made with soft graphite are the most surprising and disarming.

He did innumerable studies of poor people. He was one of the first artists to portray the inside of a factory.

He also painted royalty. In this scene of a fancy ball, he couldn’t resist including a group of gentlemen gobbling food (lower left), an undignified, but very human act.

His drawings show a universal empathy. Perhaps because of his own unusual appearance, he was fascinated with chronicling the physiognomies of his fellow humans with a fusion of frankness and compassion.

In Menzel’s work, grace often lies hidden behind unglamorous appearances. He once said, “A person not only acts with, but also has, a certain external appearance, and the latter is as inconsequential as it is accidental.”

Quote is from “Adolph Menzel, Master Drawings from East Berlin.”
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Links added later:
Menzel post on Bearded Roman, link.
Wikimedia Commons gallery, link.

Remembering a Face

One time a few years ago Jeanette and I encountered a crazy guy on the street. He started yelling at us out of the blue. When we returned home an hour or two later, a little shaken, we set the challenge of drawing him from memory.


Jeanette’s drawing is on the left, and mine on the right. We both got the beady eyes, the broad nose, the brow ridge, the spiked hair, the lines around the mouth, and the stubble. Our recollections varied in the head shape, the mouth, and the ears.

I don’t know if the cops could identify the guy based on our memory sketches.

This exercise gave me even more appreciation for Mort Drucker, the master of drawing faces from memory. If the legends is true, he did many of the MAD magazine movie satires from his recollection after simply watching the movie once through.
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Mort Drucker image from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" courtesy Mike Lynch’s blog:

Lines and Colors post on Drucker:

GurneyJourney Memory Series
Part 1: Art and Memory
Part 2: Memory Game
Part 3: Remembering a Face

Memory Game

Are you ready for a visual memory game? Please stop what you’re doing and grab a pencil and paper, and try not to scroll down to the pictures yet.

Without looking at a map or searching on the computer, draw from memory the shape of your state or province. People from Wyoming or Colorado can draw Texas.

When you’ve finished that, draw the outside shape of the continental United States—or of your country, wherever you live.

It doesn’t have to be too detailed, and don’t worry if you’re not sure, just give it a try.

On the left, below, is what Jeanette came up with for New York state. Mine is in the middle. I’m a little embarrassed of mine! I’ve driven all over the state, and I mistakenly thought the western end was squared off. But both of us got Long Island at least.

On the right is my memory drawing of the continental US. It’s got quite a few mistakes, especially around the Great Lakes, but it’s not too bad. The only reason it’s OK is that I’ve played this game before.

Now the next step is to find a map and look at it as long as you want: two minutes, five minutes, or longer. But only look one time! When you’re done looking, go somewhere and draw the shape again.

My second pass at New York State is better, but still has a lot of things wrong. I tried to conceptualize the shape as I observed it by thinking of two overlapping shapes, or of the metaphor of a hammer hitting a bent nail.

Here’s what I learned:
1. I tended to enlarge areas that I’m familiar with.
2. It helps to have a metaphorical symbol of something you need to remember.
3. When observing to remember, as Gannam said yesterday, the eye is much more searching, and takes a greater interest in the relationship of large and small shapes.

Thanks for all the great comments yesterday, everybody. Tomorrow's topic: Remembering a face
Memory Series
Part 1: Art and Memory
Part 2: Memory Game
Part 3: Remembering a Face

Drawing from Memory, Part 1

N.C. Wyeth once said: “Every illustration or painting that I have made in the last thirty years has been done from the imagination or the memory.”

Wyeth quoted a teacher of his, Charles Reed of Boston in advising him: “the faculty of memory has become a lost function among American artists. He (Reed) blamed much of the lack of mood and imagination in their work to this fact.”

American illustrator John Gannam was also a great believer in memory training. He took six months off his busy illustration career to study from nature. But he preferred to observe a scene, jot down written notes or describe it to a friend, and then paint it back in the studio from memory. Gannam claimed “that observation is more searching when it is acting for the memory than when used for immediate transcription.”

In a sense, every observational drawing is a memory drawing. Even when you’re looking at a model, you have to look for some fact and remember it for a split second while you reconstruct that fact on the drawing.

Some subjects require that the observer hold an image a little longer in memory. Moving animals, ocean waves, or sporting events change so fast that you have to study the action in the fleeting moment. Moonlight scenes are usually painted from memory just because in such limited light, accurate color judgments are impossible.

Tomorrow I’ll give you a fun exercise to test your observational memory.

Memory Series
Part 1: Art and Memory
Part 2: Memory Game
Part 3: Remembering a Face

Jury Duty

Yesterday I was called for jury duty in Poughkeepsie, New York.


I arrived at the Dutchess County courthouse and sat in a big waiting room with a lot of other prospective jurors. We filled out our forms, watched the big TV on the wall, and waited. After two hours, the Commissioner of Jurors, Hooker Heaton, told us that there was no need for us after all. We were relieved of duty.

I was glad to return home to work, but I was also a little disappointed. I was kind of hoping to get a seat on the jury so I could play at being a sketch artist.

A few years ago, Jeanette got the call. She made it all the way to jury selection. She did a sketch of Mr. Vasti, the plaintiff’s attorney in a civil case.

Easel on Rails

In this photo of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, the artist is leaning on crutches in front of a very unusual easel arrangement. He seems to be in an indoor-outdoor space. There is at least a partial greenhouse window or frosted glass diffuser overhead and a drape behind him to cut down on reflections.

The easel is mounted on four small railroad wheels resting on a track. There’s also a circular ring under the easel which might allow the easel to turn sideways.

I asked Professor Gabriel Weisberg, one of the world authorities on Dagnan, to comment. He said no specific information has surfaced about this particular photo.

About the crutches, he said, “I don't think he was debilitated in any way when this was taken. It all is part of his steadying himself.” About the rails he speculated that “perhaps he wanted to get closer to actual models or move with changing light conditions as he worked partially outside.”

The only thing I can figure is that he got the idea for using rails from the practice of some sculptors, who rely on railed carriages to move very heavy stones or bronzes in and out of the studio.

Photo from Against the Modern by Gabriel Weisberg