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.