Reading 1: The Mechanics of Visualization

The Goal of Experimentation with Visual Tools: “To see the development of your own work during a lifetime of experimentation, enabling you to find your own voice or style, an identity to your artwork that has been arrived at through trial and error, between media and discovery of a visual language that can carry your concepts.”

Drawing: “Keystone of the visual arts”

Technical Aspects:

• Pencil is most commonly used
• Paper: “Your choice in paper is as important as your choice of drawing implement…Your choice of paper directly affects the quality of your pencil mark.”
• You pick your eraser based off of what you’re drawing with, such as standard erasers for pencil marks and putty rubber/knead eraser for softer drawing materials like charcoal
• Use the appropriate sharpener for the appropriate tool
• Other drawing tools include pens and ink, brushes and ink, as well as digital drawing

The Sketch: The free flow of ideas onto paper without self-consciousness. It is not intended to be complete and allow the artist freedom to explore their ideas.

The Finished Drawing: A complete drawing that contains both accuracy in observation and authenticity.

The Observed: “Drawn from life” (at least at the beginning)

• Often has “energy and dynamism”
• The key is knowing what to include and what to leave out

The Imagined: An image that “the illustrator alone orchestrates”

• Requires research and an active imagination
• Often an assemblage of information the artist has gathered into one piece

Painting, Printmaking, and Assemblage: “More ‘final’ piece[s] of artwork than the drawing or the sketch”

Paints: Illustrators seem to prefer water-based paints

• Gouache: flat areas of color, but can be used as a wash when water is added
• Acrylic: thick textured (similar to oil paint) with a “plastic sheen”
• Watercolor: “expressive, textured and translucent”

Printmaking: “a range of mechanical techniques that can be employed to reproduce an image again and again”

• Wood engravings: carved wood that is then printed
• Linocut: carved soft linoleum that is then printed
• Drypoint: an image scratched onto a soft plate then printed
• Etching: acid eats away exposed metal; the plate is then printed
• Engraving: rather than scratched, lines are cut into a metal plate then printed
• Lithography: a wax-resist technique where an image is drawn on a stone with wax that, through a long and labor filled process, eventually results in prints being pulled from the inked up stone
• Screenprinting: a stenciled screen is used through which ink is pressed resulting in prints
• Monoprinting: the image it drawn on glass/plexi-glass and then printed
• Digital printing: limited-edition, digital fine-prints

Assemblage/Collage: “where the artist/illustrator uses fragments of ‘found’ imagery and assembles the in a new way”

Digital: mimics the “feel of printed materials… in order to give their work a more human feel and to sidestep issues of time and money”

Traditions of Depicting Space

Space: an illusion that “transfers a three-dimensional image on to a two-dimensional picture plane.”

The Indian Tradition:

• “Preparation for painting”
• Forms nearest viewer are at the bottom; furthest away are at top and possibly has other images overlapping them
• Normally no size/scale variance unless an image is special, such as “a deity, a mythological hero, or a member of the aristocracy”

The East Asian Tradition:

• “Close relationship between calligraphy, drawing, and painting”
• Line (like a drawing) is used “to depict and express different qualities within the subject”
• Very minimalistic
• “Parallel lines diverge”
• Ties/Similarities to African and Indian traditions when it comes to important characters and overlapping to show recession in an image

The African Tradition:

• “Preparation for sculptures and paintings”
• Used stylized forms to capture “religious ideas, practices, and rituals within the community”
• Egyptians focused on “the most recognizable features of a character”: heads in profile, “torso is shown from the front”, and females have one breast “seen from front on, the other in profile”

The Western Tradition:

• Was similar to eastern styles until perspective was introduced by Filippo Brunelleschi; since then rules have been created to the point nearly everything is created to show the world as humans see it.
• “When perspective is exaggerated or ignored by artist and illustrators, it is usually for artistic or dramatic effect.”

Perspective

Key terms:

• Fixed viewpoint: the fixed point from where an image is drawn
• Cone of vision: the 60 degrees of clear vision that a human can comfortably view an image in without using their peripheral vision; keep drawings under 30 degrees to either side of the central line of sight
• Picture plane: imaginary vertical plane on which a drawing is plotted; it’s perpendicular to and at right angles to the central line of vision
• Farther away = bigger picture plane
• Distance reduces distortion
• Vanishing points (VP): parallel lines converge toward a given point
• The Horizon line: where an imagined horizontal line going through the eye meets the picture plane; where the ground plane ends
• The vanishing point will be on this

Guided Principles:

• Parallel lines appear to converge when views obliquely
• Equal dimensions become foreshortened as they recede
• Objects of similar size appear to diminish as they recede
• Overlapping by foreground objects obscures the view of more distant objects
• Atmospheric perspective: denotes distance and diminished the intensity of colors and contrast
• Texture and pattern: more detailed up close

One-point Perspective: has one vanishing point

Two-point Perspective: has two vanishing points; oblique boxes/rooms use this

Three-point Perspective: has three vanishing points; when the viewer is up close to the image and at an interesting viewpoint