CREATIVE OUTLOOK: DRAWING IDEAS

Improving Drawings for Your Portfolio

by Deborah Zlotsky, Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing, The College of Saint Rose

Preparing an impressive portfolio begins with creating remarkable drawings. Often, what distinguishes a bland drawing from an extraordinary one is the personal perspective of the artist. For each piece that you include in your portfolio, you should be able to describe not only what the work is (what you see when you look at it), but what its meaning is to you. Meaning (your experience of observing something) and your description of it via the language of drawing are essential to making remarkable drawings. When you take time to re- flect on your goals for a particular drawing, you will find yourself more aware of the decisions you make. While “creating” drawings is a way of responding to your observations of the world around you, remember that focusing exclusively on what you see often reduces the drawing to an illustration (a depiction of an image rather than a record of your experience).

The following comments are not rules but suggestions for making better decisions and stronger drawings, appropriate to this point in your career as a young artist. Strong drawing hinges on an individual point of view. Through a vocabulary of mark, value, scale, simplification, space, illusion and structural interrelationships, you can communicate in the language of drawing. That visual language establishes a point of view, and the point of view creates a great deal of the meaning, or content, within the drawing. Subject matter does play a role, but it’s probably smaller than you would think.

One of the most important visual elements is composition or organization. In every drawing, you need to think about the whole page. Since you have the power to organize your drawing, it’s impossible to run out of space, awkwardly crop a form, leave too much negative space or concentrate on only a small part of the drawing. If you’re thinking only about a form you want to describe and the paper is just a field to place it on, you’re making a sketch, not a drawing. To make a fullbodied drawing, think about activating the entire surface of the paper. Remember too that you don’t need to make drawings dictated by the size or proportion of your pad of paper. You can tape or draw new edges on the paper to create any size or shape. You can also buy rolls of paper to make large drawings. In order to think about the whole area, visualize a scale that “weighs” the left side and the right side. Are the sides balanced and tense, or is there more activity or visual weight on one side? Rethink the composition to create tension and balance on both sides. You can do the same thing for the top and bottom. In this way, you’re choosing how to activate the two dimensional space of your drawing.

Creating the illusion of space on a two dimensional surface is another important element, as it’s very easy to make flat drawings. You can add life to your drawing by suggesting a sense of space and air. What parts of the visual language can help? Perspective, simpli- fied relationships, light information, scale changes and overlap all indicate space. If you set up a still life or select a portion of a room to study, what view allows you to understand the way objects and forms inhabit a space? Lining up a group of bowls across from you creates a rather narrow space that is parallel to the viewing plane. Placing those same bowls in an irregular, organic sequence moving back in space articulates a larger area and allows you to orchestrate a much more dynamic set of relationships. In the student drawing of the bottles, the overlap, changing ellipses, scale differences, negative space and unequal spacing create a lively sense of space. Notice too how the lines intersect at a variety of points around all four sides of the page. The student simplified the information in front of her to make a clear, strong drawing. Think of all the additional information she might have included but chose not to. If you describe light, be sure to set up a clear, and perhaps dramatic, light. Underlying much of what is discussed here is a focus on drawing from observation.

Drawing based on perception has a greater potential for revealing your understanding of space. If you work from photographs or other two dimensional imagery, you are starting from a flat image with little information about an actual space with distances and relationships between parts. Additionally, many images in magazines and on the web have been digitally altered, which further distances you from understanding space. Working from observation allows you to be more fully engaged in looking and responding. In fact, you are part of the space you describe. An important part of observing is measuring the distances and positions between the forms: heights, widths and angles. In order to accurately measure these interrelationships, you’ll need to think two-dimensionally. Look out at a space as if a large piece of glass hangs between you and the rest of the space. If you could take a marker and draw extended lines on the glass to indicate the angle of the side of a table, the height of a chair or the negative space on the floor between the table and the chair, you would build up many, many lines that document positions in two-dimensional space. Eventually you would create an active, three-dimensionally accurate drawing of the viewing area that reveals the process of looking. Leaving the process of discovering relationships in the final drawing is much more exciting than concentrating on harsh contours with inaccurate proportional relationships.

The student drawing of the chair shows how the student recorded angles, heights and widths only. She wasn’t thinking chair” throughout the process; she was only thinking about one measurement at a time. Eventually she “built” the chair as a by-product of the process of looking and measuring. In her drawing, process leads to product and process becomes product. Underlying any strong drawing from observation is the structure of the space built from the proportions, relative size, planes, recessional angles and distances between the forms. Your use of visual elements adds to or reduces the impact of your drawing. No element is inherently good or bad. A definite point of view within your drawing may come from the scale; the format; the combination of materials or media; the temperament of the overall light situation; the mark making; the sense of physical distance; and/or the complexity or subtlety of described relationships. Subject matter is vital, but don’t assume that it dictates the viewer’s interest level. Steer clear of cliched imagery like toys, dolls, shoes and cartoons; over-used still life imagery like wine bottles, fruit and baskets; and photo-based imagery like copies of photos from popular sport, fashion and music magazines. The student drawing of the drapery is a good example of a subject that is everyday, but visually rich and complex.

As you build your drawing portfolio, experiment with a variety of approaches. Be clear about your choices for each drawing so that you can concentrate on what’s most important. If you are stuck for ideas, go to the library to look at artists’ drawings that might inspire you. For example, looking through a book on Jim Dine’s drawings of trees might give you ideas for mark making, dramatic light or combining charcoal with pastel. Don’t worry about “stealing” ideas. If you’re thoughtful, you’ll make drawings inspired by a library full of exceptional teachers whose work will broaden your understanding of what a drawing can be.