Thursday, August 7, 2014

Do You Know All Your Lines?

Pencil sketching is just beginning of how to experiment with lines. The artifice of line is one of the aspects of drawing that I am most in love with. The fact that we can take line-which doesn't exist in the natural world-and create works of art that look incredibly real or full of fakery, depending on what we want to do with it, is enthralling.

And artists do so much with it. I mean, just think of all the various types of line that you might use in any given pencil sketch.

You could start with a something elementary like an outline drawing with rectilinear lines that are straight with pointed angles. A cube or an architectural blueprint comes to mind, as does Michelangelo's design of the Medici Chapel in Florence.

But that's only the start. Sketching with curvilinear or organic lines that are curving, oftentimes gestural, and free-flowing can produce drawings as various as those of Willem de Kooning or Raphael or Bouguereau