Drawing for Printers. / A practical treatise on the art of designing and illustrating in connection with typography. Containing complete instruction, fully illustrated, concerning the art of drawing, for the beginner as well as the more advanced student.

by Ernest Knaufft

CHAPTER III.

HIEROGLYPHIC DESIGNS OR SILHOUETTES — THEIR USE AS TYPOGRAPHICAL ORNAMENTS — OBJECTS SEEN AS ON ONE PLANE — PLACING YOUR OBJECT — HORIZONTAL LINES PARALLEL TO THE EYE — HORIZONTAL LINES NOT PARALLEL TO THE EYE.

WE PUBLISH two kinds of drawings with this chapter, which many be classified as follows: The Grassets are hieroglyphic-like designs or silhouettes; the Crispi, in his robe de chambre, which for want of the artist’s name we shall call the Don Chisciotte cut—“Don Chisciotte” you no doubt suspect is the Italian for Don Quixote, and it is the name of a cartoon paper—is a pure outline drawing.

Now let us take them in turn. Every printer will recognize that the Grasset designs are excellent, for they may be printed with greater ease than shaded drawings, and their simplicity is in perfect harmony with the solid black of type. Now, not only would it {33} be pleasant for you as a printer to begin making some such silhouettes, but it is very good practice in drawing for you to search the house for objects that you can put up against the window pane and draw their contours, filling them in with black. A whisk broom, a pair of scissors, a pair of eyeglasses, a leaf, a feather may be put up against the glass and its silhouette copied, and you then realize how many objects may be represented by their contours. Later you learn how to silhouette objects less flat; you may try the ink bottle with a pen in it, the glue pot with the brush in it; this leads you to such a thorough understanding of Grasset’s flowers as pages of writing would never give. In walking in the streets after such an exercise you will notice not only the “block” of a man’s hat (which we spoke of in Chapter I), but you will notice what kind of a silhouette it makes against the sky; then the shape of the birds, the weather vanes, the church steeples as they are “etched against the sky,” as the poets say, will have a new interest for you.

In this practice of silhouetting objects you learn something that is most important in more advanced work. You learn to see objects as on one plane. We fancy your knowledge of geometry is sufficient for you to understand what we mean, but let us go over the ground slowly so that it may facilitate our future explanations of perspective problems.

By a plane we mean a plain, a flat surface. A table top is a plane. But the plane the artist draws upon—say a sheet of paper—though he may let it lie horizontal on a table, is always considered a vertical plane, corresponding to a pane of glass in a window. Now, if {34} we are looking across the street, through the window, we know that each receding cobblestone in the street (though in one horizontal plane) is in a different vertical plane from the others. If we wished to make the plane a tangible one we could set up a pane of glass in front of the nearest cobblestone, and then another pane in front of the cobblestone across the street, then it would be evident to anyone that these stones were in two planes, would it not? Good! Now, if you should go to the window and trace with a paint brush a picture of these two cobblestones on the glass, you would draw your picture on one plane, and that a vertical plane. Well, that is just what the artist does when he draws a picture by the eye. He may lay his paper horizontally on a common table, or obliquely on a tipping drawing table, or on an easel, but he does not draw the objects as though seen through a horizontal or oblique plane (except sometimes when he sketches from a church-steeple or a hilltop), but on the contrary, the ordinary drawing always represents objects as seen through a vertical pane of glass and as they would be traced on that pane, hence reduced to one plane.

Having read the foregoing two or three times we will ask you to turn to the Don Chisciotte caricature. Has it not a new interest to you? Do you not see immediately that the legs of the bureau, though in reality some few feet apart and so in different planes, are drawn on a sheet of paper on one plane? Well, the second step after you have learned to draw a simple form in outline is to learn to “place” your objects and their receding parts—as the legs of the bureau. It would be impossible for me to overestimate the trouble this gives the {35} beginner—such as the man who sees the factory viewed at an angle as though it were seen from the front (see Chapter I). But if perchance you can get it into your mind that you must draw as though tracing on a window pane, nay, better still, if you will dip a brush in the ink and actually draw on the pane for several days, you will soon have little need of puzzling over perspective, and when you look diagonally at a rectangular object—as the windows in a factory—you will see at a glance that they are no longer rectangles, as in a front view, but the lintels and sills actually seem to tip (in an upward direction if below the eye, in a downward direction if above the eye). Then you suddenly realize that certain laws of optics come into play in making the very simplest of views. You look at such a simple interior as in the Don Chisciotte room and you recognize at once that the lines in it which were horizontal in nature are governed by three laws; the portière rod and the side boards of the couch are drawn horizontal because the artist sees them in a front view—they are parallel to his eye—but the lines of the front of the bureau and the floor line behind it run up because they are lines seen not in front view, but seen diagonally, and they are below the artist’s eye; but the top line of the mirror runs down because it is above the artist’s eye.

From this chapter any reader with a mathematical mind will have already deduced the facts of the following rules of perspective, even if he has not formulated them in precise language; but you might as well learn them by heart, as they are applied every time you draw a box, a table, a room, a railroad track, a street, etc.

1. All horizontal lines in nature that are parallel to {36}

PEN DRAWING. By Jules Girardet. Showing a mantel a little below the eye.

The student should practice drawing interiors with the purpose of learning the theory of perspective from every object drawn. The horizontal lines of the picture frame, for example, tip in the opposite direction to the mantel, because they are above the eye. Had the mantel been a few inches higher it would have been drawn as a perfectly horizontal line.

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CRISPI AS CÆSAR IN HIS ROBE DE CHAMBRE. A political caricature from Don Chisciotte.

{38} the eyes of the spectator (like the portière rod and the bed part of the couch in the Don Chisciotte caricature, like the lintels and sills of the Sorbonne doorway), that is when one is standing directly in front of them, appear as horizontal lines and are to be so drawn, they do not tip either up or down whether below or above the eye.

2. But when a horizontal line is no longer parallel to the axis of the eyes, that is when it is seen diagonally, as the floor line, the front of the bureau and the top of the mirror, then it follows this law; if it happens to be just on a level with the eyes, that is on the horizon line, then it is horizontal to the sight and is so drawn; if the mirror were hanging where it is in the Don Chisciotte, but were cut off just on a level with Crispi’s eyes, and the draftsman of the picture were just Crispi’s height, then the base of the mirror would be drawn horizontal. But when the lines are below the eye, as the floor line and the bureau lines, then they seem to run up to the horizon and are drawn slanting upward; while if they are above the eye, as the top of the mirror, they tip down to the horizon and are drawn slanting downward—the end farther away from the artist lower in the picture than the end nearer him. (See the side buildings in the Sorbonne courtyard.)

It is advisable for the student of perspective to cut a rectangular opening, not too large, say the size of this page, in a piece of pasteboard, which he may hold at arm’s length in front of him and look through as he would through a small window. This will not only frame his picture for him, but it gives him two horizontal lines and two perpendicular lines, and he can hold his pencil or his ruler against the face of the frame {39} so that it just covers any straight line he wishes to draw; and he will readily see that all vertical lines in nature make his pencil run parallel to the sides of his frame, while horizontal lines if in nature parallel to the axis of his eyes, or if on a level with his eyes, make it run parallel to the base and top. And then, best of all, he can hold his pencil parallel to oblique lines which run away from him, and they will appear parallel to the face of his frame, or in one plane, as they would be in a drawing. This is very helpful, as there is nothing so confusing to the beginner as the lines which run away from him. (In looking up a railroad track the rails seem to run away. You know they are actually parallel, but to your eye they converge. Not only that, but you know they are flat on the ground, whereas, in a picture, you draw them standing up. All this is at first very confusing.)

TYPOGRAPHICAL ORNAMENT. Designed by Eugene Grasset.

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MEN OF THE DAY—CRISPI. By Luque. From La Caricature.

TYPOGRAPHICAL ORNAMENT. Designed by Eugene Grasset.