Gray wolf in colored pencil - copy from Carl Brenders

Time is still too short to go on with the triangulation tutorial. Maybe next week my students will be so busy they will give me some time off, but for now there is no way I can do it. So, to keep this place alive, here is something nice I did in colored pencil. Well, at least I think it's nice.

Making copies is a great way to learn. This is a very small copy (about 10x10 cm) done in colored pencil of a Carl Brenders (gouache?) original. It was pretty fast, maybe around three or four very relaxed hours over two sessions. Most of the trouble it gave me was self-inflicted. I wanted to do the whole thing just with four pencils (caran-d'ache orange, yellow, light blue (though I forgot and used a bit of darker blue on the nose, I think, quite without need), and red, and black for darkening and gray for desaturating. I wanted to prove to a couple of friends that you don't need the convenience colors, as the name implies, you can mix them as long as you have saturated colors, it's the opposite you cannot do - those glowing "neon" colors just can't be made from your payne's gray, burnt umber, sienna, or sap greens, I'm afraid, but the opposite is quite doable, though it will tax your patience (and therefore teach you a lot about your colors).

Oh, and the hairs were done with a blade.

Triangulating Yorick

A skull from an archeological dig, that we had around in our scientific illustration class. Yes, of course we called him Yorick. I wonder what blunt instrument made that indentation on his forehead (not to mention that ruined eye-socket and those zygomatic arches; but those are fragile and the poor guy was centuries old). I started by triangulating it, but then I got distracted by something (there was always something going on on those classes!) and I believe I just eyeballed the back of the head. It was just a joyous little drawing, the real job at that time was hard, time-consuming, mind-numbing stippling. 

Work in progress

At a very garish stage....just something to keep you guys (all two of you) happy while I'm too busy with classes to preach about the joys of triangulation for life drawing.

a small delay

Well, classes are starting and I am on a deathmarch to finish some course notes for my students this week.
This means that the calibration exercises for triangulation will have to wait for about a week or so.
Sorry to keep anyone waiting.

Calibration

This gentleman provides the same valuable lesson as a classically trained musician that keeps on doing scales time after time: you have to calibrate yourself. Yes, this is about cutting hair. So what?

Watch him after 2:00 if nothing else. He provides exercises to train the hand to feel the lenghth of the hair it is holding. He uses a ruler for the exercise. Of course he won't be using a ruler in his practice! The purpose is to get feedback. You cannot train the hand if you don't have accurate feedback. Immediate, accurate feedback, a guess/check/correct cycle, is essential to make you learn. It punishes and rewards your neurons according to your performance, and drives you in the right direction. Too many art teachers repeat the refrain "practice makes perfect". No it doesn't. It has to be the right kind of practice. If you keep practicing only complicated exercises (like drawing a full portrait each time) where the complexity is so great that you have no clear feedback, where you can't really know where and when you screwed up, where feedback happens at too great intervals, then you'll only make progress painfuly and after too much exertion, and almost in spite of practice (most of the time you'll be practicing and reinforcing precisely your worst mistakes). Yes, it may still work, but that is a credit to the wonderful ability of the human mind to learn even in the worst of circumstances: one has to ask, however, why should one pay good money to do it the hard, dumb way.

Watch this gentleman work and ask yourself what exercises in your routine, if any, correspond to what he is doing.

Next up I'll be making a post on an simple exercise that can help calibrate your brain for triangulation. (even if you don't use triangulation you should ask yourself what are your "scales" for your preferred measuring/drawing method. And like any musician you should practice your scales as often as possible)

Orange is what you are

Photoshop is your friend. Certainly, you'll say, the camera doesn't see as we do, it alters colors, etc. That is besides the point. Once you are looking at the colors on the screen, if they make up a good tromp l'oeil to you (and my gosh, isn't a photo almost as realistic as, say, a photo?) then there is something to learn from it.

The color prejudices of the XIXth century have been substituted by the color prejudices of the more recent years. Now everybody sees purple shadows, even when they aren't there, and everyone sees complementary colors in form shadows even when none are around. It is good to have a mechanical, innocent machine to tell you honestly what it sees. Take a photo, spot a color in photoshop, then make a patch with it. Working in HSV, then place side by side its maximum chroma at constant value. Sometimes you'll be very surprised. One of the first things I was taught in art class was that "yellow and black make green". I wondered why for a long time. No, it's not some weird effect of either yellow pigments or black, most blacks have a surprisingly flat spectrum, the fact is that the "fact" is untrue. Yellow and black doesn't make green, it makes dark unsaturated  yellow, as it should. But what does yellow look like at low chroma? Yes, it looks "green". The fact is that we get very confused at low chroma, if we don't have the training. If you do this little photoshop analysis as a habit you'll find that in most pictures of humans all you get is orange and red, none of the famous greens or purples. An amazing lot of seemingly purple and green shadows are nothing but honest unsaturated oranges. Orange is what we are. 

Note: on the picture I have also placed patches of maximum value at constant chroma and null-chroma patches. This last one is not useful in HSV mode, as value in HSV doesn't correspond to what you get by squinting. You should use LAB mode if you want to examine value (or lightness).

Triangulation How-To

Ok, so now we know how to measure angles and draw the corresponding lines on our pad. So how do you go about drawing this handsome fellow by triangulation (at last)?

Remember the side-angle-angle theorem? One side and two angles determine a triangle. Meaning they determine the position of the missing vertex once you know two vertices.

So we start by choosing an arbitrary line to be the given side in the side-angle-angle theorem. I like to start from big to small, so I'll try to choose a line joining two distant points in the figure. Also, I like to start simple, so I choose a simple vertical alignement.

I notice by scanning vertically with my pencil that the central point of the head aligns vertically with the inside of the right leg and with the point where the foot intersects the inside of the leg. The most important thing is that this is a line I'll have no problem in finding again. I choose two points on that lign. The first is the point where the ridge of the head (see the highlight there?) intersects that line, and the second is the top of the foot where it intersects both the leg and the line. I cannot forget where those point are, so I make sure where they are and memorize them.

Now what do I draw? I draw on my pad a line making the same angle as this one. In this case the angle is 90 degrees, it is a vertical line. How big do i draw it? As big as I want. The size of the line I draw is arbitrary as long as it has the same angle with the vertical of the pad as the line on the model has with the true vertical. How big I choose to make this line determines only the scale. I choose the line according to the size I want the figure to occupy on my drawing. After I make this initial choice, the scale is fixed.

Now I measure the angle of the line that joins the vertex of the head to the center of the joint of the elbow. On my pad I make a line (a faint line, to erase later) that starts on the top of the first line I made and makes the same angle as I measured on the model.

Now I measure the angle from the point at the foot to the same point on the elbow. I draw the line on my pad, starting at the point of the foot (the low end of the first line I put on the drawing) and making the same angle with the pad as I measured on the model.

Now, the two lines will intersect at some point. That point is the point on my drawing where the elbow is located! So I found the elbow by triangulation, that is, I constructed a triangle, by measuring two angles from a given side, such that the found vertex is the center of the elbow.

Ok, so I don't really need the construction lines anymore, I can erase them. What is left is three points: Head, foot, elbow. From these I can find others by triangulation, once more.

Here I find the other elbow, in the same way as before. Now I have four points.

Time for a checkpoint: up to now I measured everything from my initial two points. Now I check for consistency. I measure the the angle of the line that joins the two elbows on the model. If it checks out with the angle on my drawing I proceed. If not, I go back and check what I did. The first measurements are the hardest and the most important, so make sure of them.

When everything checks out we proceed: We triangulate the shoulder from the two elbows: measure the angle from one elbow to the shoulder, then from the other, intersect the two lines and you have the shoulder point.

Then proceed like this: triangulate the other shoulder, then check for consistency from one shoulder to the other. Also check the triangle that the head makes with the shoulder girdle (the line between the two shoulders).

Then find, in the same way, the main joints: the knees, ankles, the points of the hips. Stick to points you can name and identify readily. The biggest danger is getting confused and not knowing from where you measured what. Especially at the start, it is probably good not to erase construction lines (with practice you won't even make the lines, just the points mostly, but for now go easy)

A good exercise would be to plot all these green points. They are all anatomical landmarks (in the anatomy of wooden dolls :)). Start with a doll if possible, then try it on a human. At first you'll find it hard, but later you'll find that these are far too many points. I use this thing to do quick anatomical drawings, just by tracing the main lines: limb directions, position of joints, no need for measuring lenghts because the lengths come automatically from the angles of the imaginary lines.

Always focus on points you can identify. On humans focus on bony landmarks, try to get a scheme for what you want, so that you won't ever be in doubt in the middle of a drawing over what you measured or from where. Good landmarks are the usual: joints, ridges, places where angles change abruptly. Also, high contrast intersections of soft tissues, but only in special cases as these depend on static positions and any small move breaks them apart. Bones are reliable.

This last one would be really going too far. But it would be easy, from the other, and from this point you would just be painting by numbers. Which is not the point at all, so remember to distinguish between an exercise and a way of drawing. After a while it is up to you to learn what measurements you need. You don't want or need milimetric precision, you want a quick and effective method to find the major measurements. After you have those, be brave and just look, and see, and draw.

Your ultimate purpose is to need no measuring at all.

next: how to calibrate yourself.