Category Archives: Seeing

From the Whole to the Parts

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After a few years’ absence, with only a smattering of postings to celebrate Lunar New Years, mark the 50th anniversary of the beginning of my teaching career, and mourn the losses caused by the devastating fire in Lahaina in 2023, I will again be posting drawings occasionally as time permits.

This first set are drawings of a stave church built in the early 13th century. While I usually advocate for including context in a scene, here I omitted the surroundings as the church was moved from Gol, Norway, to the Norsk Folkemuseum outside of Oslo, where it now resides as a set piece.

What you see on the left is my first attempt, which illustrates a common error made when beginning a drawing—that of working from the top down. Beginning with the topmost pyramidal tier and tentatively blocking out the lower tiers, I soon realized that I wouldn’t have enough room to complete the structure with the proper proportions. Rather than squeeze the structure in by distorting the proportional relationships, I began anew with the right-hand drawing.

Here, I followed an important principle—work from the whole to the parts, to keep everything in proportion and still maintain an image that will fit the page. Working this way, one first fits the overall height on the page, and then carefully subdivide the proper number of tiers. Whether beginning with the overall height of a subject, as in this case, or the overall size of a vertical plane, it is almost always a good idea to begin with as large an element in the composition as possible to ensure the subject and its context will fit the page.

Drawing from Memory

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Almost all drawing is memory drawing—drawing from memory. Even when drawing on location, as soon as we turn our gaze from the subject of our drawing to the page, we rely on our visual memory of what we have seen to be able to project this image onto the page and to draw it. Nurturing this ability to see, scan, visualize, project, and draw takes time and practice. But once we are comfortable with the process, drawing from observation will become that much more fluid.

To Meet or Not to Meet

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Before the advent of computer graphics, meeting lines deliberately at a corner had long been a maxim in the manual drafting of architectural and engineering documents. This may appear to be a minor detail, but in freehand drawing—from direct observation—how lines meet, or not meet, can convey much about the nature of the forms we are capturing.

Take, for example, the drawings above, where meeting lines at corners can convey a crispness of planes and edges of volumes.

On the other hand, not meeting lines can convey the softness of curves and curvilinear forms, as in the sculpted nature of a marble bust or the contours of a landscape.

At times, the deliberate gaps between lines can merely suggest a form or create context without calling too much attention and detracting from the focus of a drawing.

Trial and Error

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In shifting our gaze from the subject before us to the paper surface with pen in hand, we must be able to hold the seen image in our head and recreate it on paper. Oftentimes, this translation can result in faulty proportions, as in this drawing of Michelangelo’s Moses in S. Pietro in Vincoli, in Rome. You will notice that I made a couple of attempts at getting the length of the lower right leg to match what I believed I saw in Michelangelo’s sculpture. This is an example of how the process of drawing from observation requires continually assessing whether the proportions and scale of the drawn image matches those of what is seen—a matter of trial and error.

Above is another example, where, beneath the gridded facets, you might be able to see my initial attempts in roughing out the forms of the Seattle Central Library by OMA/Koolaus. Initially, I drew the forms too narrowly given the building’s height. I kept increasing the width as the drawing developed. In looking at the drawing now, it seems that it could be wider still.

Notan

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This a line drawing of the Danube, one of the Four River Gods in Bernini’s fountain in Rome’s Piazza Navona. The line is the quintessential element of drawing, able to convey to the mind’s eye three-dimensional forms in space, often not by its presence but rather by its absence—where we decide to stop a contour…and pick it up again.

These cropped enlargements of the original drawing use areas of black to emphasize the negative spaces of the drawing and the white of the sculpture. This brings to mind notan, the Japanese term for “light dark;” some translate it as “light dark harmony.” It is a concept revolving around the placement and interplay of light and dark elements in the composition of a collage, drawing, or painting. It is valued as a way to study possible compositions without the distractions of color, texture, or details.

Drawing Lessons

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From a Rome journal, two pages of sketches drawn during a teaching session. The first page contains explanatory sketches accompanied by bits of concise text: “Pay attention to profiles”…“Suggest details within shadows”…“Visualize shape of curves.”

The second page illustrates how to estimate proportional heights above and below an imagined horizon line.

Taking Notes

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Being able to listen, absorb, and process information during a lecture or conference is a valuable skill, one that can be practiced and cultivated by taking notes by hand. These notes can often be augmented with word diagrams and visual imagery that come to mind to reinforce points being made or expressing one’s understanding of what is being said. Here are a few pages of notes I took during a Design Communication Conference in 2018. See also my posts on 10.30.16 and 10.14.20 on the similar subject of taking visual notes. 

Building Codes Illustrated, 7th Edition

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Even with the nice, sunny weather we’ve been having, there hasn’t been enough time to go out and capture scenes in and around Seattle. I’ve been busily working with Steve Winkel and editors from Wiley and the International Code Council on revising Building Codes Illustrated to incorporate the changes effected by the 2021 edition of the International Building Code. For example, the title page above reflects how the development of mass timber construction has led to the creation of new categories of Type IV construction.

This page illustrates the necessary provisions for accessible electric vehicle charging stations (EVCS).

This series of illustrations is an example of how the book attempts to explain in graphical terms the intent of code requirements. In this case, these graphics illuminate the theory underlying horizontal exits.

Note: All of the illustrations in BCI were created in Adobe Illustrator.