Friday, February 3, 2012

Building A Vocabulary Of Mark Making

A common issue faced when drawing from life is the frustration cause by a lack of a mark making vocabulary.

Drawing is the language of describing the 3 diminutional world on a flat sheet of paper, and doing it without the use of letters or words. Drawing uses marks, scribbles, dashes, smears... hundreds of variations. If you approach a drawing with only the mark making language used in hand writing, your drawing will reflect that lack of knowledge. It's like reading Moby Dick at only a Dick and Jane reading level.

So, tonight's Drawing Fundamentals class focused on building a vocabulary. We started by copying a few Chinese landscape drawings, which are loaded with mark making variations. In the drawing above, you can see that Clayton is exploring how to reproduce those marks.


We then moved on to drawing from a still life. Clayton is now using his pencil to a much fuller extent. Creating marks that describe light, texture, weight, and volume. These variations are the nouns, verbs, and adjectives that create visual poetry.

Next week we will be exploring the Darker Side Of Mass.

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