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 VIII.

STUDY BY DAGNAN-BOUVERET — A HAT IN OUTLINE NOT MEANT FOR AN OUTLINE DRAWING — CONNECTING LINK BETWEEN OUTLINE AND SHADED DRAWING — MORE ABOUT ART-SCHOOL METHODS — METHOD OF DRAWING BASED UPON CAST DRAWING — THE BIG SHADOWS VERSUS MINOR SHADOWS — DO NOT DRAW INDIVIDUAL HAIRS — HAIR AND MUSTACHE TO BE CONSIDERED AS A MASS, NOT AS SEPARATE HAIRS — EFFECT TO BE OBTAINED BY MASSES OF SHADOWS — TRAIN THE EYE TO BECOME SENSITIVE TO GRADUATIONS OF LIGHT AND SHADE — LIGHT AND DARK IN THE HEAD INTENDED TO SHOW SHAPE OF THE SKULL, NOT TO INDICATE PARTI-COLORED HAIR — DRAWING FROM PASTEBOARD BOXES GOOD TRAINING IN LEARNING TO SEE LIGHT AND SHADE — CONTRASTING A FINISHED DRAWING (GAILLARD) WITH A ROUGH SKETCH — EQUAL ART IN EACH WHEN BOTH ARE WELL DONE — A NEWSPAPER CUT IN WHICH LIGHT AND SHADE ARE INDICATED BY VARIATION OF THICKNESS IN LINE — BROAD DRAWING RECOMMENDED TO PRINTERS — THE NASO-LABIAL LINE — RÉSUMÉ.

IN OUR il­lus­tra­tion by Dag­nan-Bou­ver­et we find most in­ter­est­ing in­di­ca­tions of how an ar­tist works; and this head may serve as a connecting link between the chapter on outline and the one on shading. The hat is a beautiful piece of outline drawing, which, however, was not meant for an outline drawing. It is simply to serve as the placing of the hat, which would afterward be shaded as are the face and mustache. The eyes, {74} nose and mustache were first outlined in this way, and you will recognize, I think, that this is the same kind of drawing as that of which we treated in our first chapters, though, of course, the hat is not all in one plane.

But before you can thoroughly appreciate the drawing of the face it is necessary that I should explain a little further the study of drawing as it is taught in the art schools. This I will do with the help of the Lœwe-Marchand cut. In this, we see the method pursued in almost all art schools the world over: a method based upon cast drawing. It is found from experience that students learn to see form more prominently from a plaster cast, which is white, than from natural objects; and it is found that the best results are got if the students are taught to see the big shadows of an object rather than the multitude of minor shadows which may be seen upon close scrutiny. So the student is told not to look for these minor shadows, but to half close his eyes, and stand a good distance away from the object—say three times its height—and look for the form that he sees when the object becomes to his half-closed eyes nothing more than a mass with a light and a dark side. You can imagine that after a person has learned to get the effect of a hand and a foot, as in the illustration in Chapters VII and X, by merely noting the shape of the one big shadow, that it is not difficult for him to go farther and put in the minor shadows by opening his eyes and examining the object more closely; and that when he has learned to do this for several months, or perchance several years, in the antique class, and then for as long, or longer, in the life class, that he has become {75}

CHARCOAL DRAWING. Portrait of M. X., by Lœwe-Marchand. This drawing was doubtless made on a sheet of charcoal paper, possibly gray in color, and was then photographed for the direct process; and then, in order to indicate the gray paper, the photo-engraver tinted the zinc plate with a Ben Day film, which gives the stipple result. The cross lines in the corner indicate that after the artist made his study he wished to enlarge it upon a canvas preliminary to painting, which was done by covering the drawing with squares and adding a diagonal to the same. These squares and diagonals were repeated on a larger scale on the canvas and the drawing enlarged freehand by placing the different points of the original in the corresponding triangles on the canvas. This method of enlarging drawings has been used for five thousand years.

{76} so sensitive to seeing shadows that it is not difficult for him to discern them upon anything and everything. Now, that is the secret of the beautiful drawing of the mustache in the Dagnan-Bouveret drawing. The beginner draws the hairs of the mustache, and tries to get his effect in that way; but you cannot by drawing the pelt of a fox on a barn door get the effect of one with a real live body underneath it. The result in this drawing is due entirely to Dagnan-Bouveret’s sensitiveness to light and shade. The lines, which the casual observer would take to be the hairs of the mustache, are really the shadows thrown by the groups of hairs as they part here and there. It is true that if he were etching this head or drawing it with a fine pen, he might in finishing it put in a few hairs, and even Albrecht Dürer would sometimes get a good effect by drawing the hairs of the mustache or the curls on a head. But in nearly all modern work, the hair, mustache or beard is considered as a mass receiving light and shade, and is so treated, there being no great difference between the golden hair of a child and the white hair of an old woman.

In the beautiful study by Gaillard we see the shape of the skull under the woman’s hair, and there is a very great difference between the part that is in shadow around her ears and the part that is light on the top of her head. This does not mean that the hair was gray on top, and black around the ears, but it means that the light struck the hair on top, while it did not strike it on the sides.

Now, if you can give yourself the time to study from the cast, or even from simple pasteboard boxes, so that your eye will become sensitive to these graduations from {77}

STUDY FOR THE PORTRAIT OF MME. R. By C. F. Gaillard.

{78} light to dark, you will soon realize that, while in your drawing for printing you may never in a hundred years’ practice draw anything so delicate as the Gaillard, yet in your simplest drawings you may put in practice the theory upon which it is made. For example, if you are drawing an old woman’s head, even if you only use four or five lines to represent her hair, you will not press upon your pen when you are doing her hair on the top, but you will press upon it when you come within the region of the ears; and that pressure, though it will not represent hairs, nor the actual value of the shadow, will yet give the difference between the light on the top of the head and the shadow behind the ears, and this will suggest to the educated eye the roundness of the cranium.

Now we reproduce also the rough Watts drawing. Let us contrast these two drawings. The one is almost as finished as it can be, the other slight; yet I want you to realize why I recommend this slight drawing to printers and tell you that it is artistic. It is so because in the very heavy lines that you see in the ear, beard and coat there is knowledge of modeling. The artist knew his business just as Gaillard did, and every time he put down a blotty line it was meant to represent the presence of a shadow. This face is from a photograph; hundreds of delicate tones have been left out; and the white hair of the beard is modeled with nothing but thin and heavy lines while the shadows of the photograph were delicate gray tints! A clever penman drawing from a photograph uses darks which the uneducated eye will take to be arbitrary blackening of the drawing, but which an artist knows are the result of intelligent observation.

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GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS, R. A. An English newspaper cut from Tid-Bits, artist unknown. An excellent example of newspaper work. Note that the skull-cap is not represented partly gray and partly black because the artist meant to indicate a cap that was one color in front and another in the back, but he meant to show the rounding of the cranium, just as Gaillard did in varying the tones in the hair of the old woman.

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Now, in the Gaillard drawing you see a very delicate line running diagonally from the wing of the nose almost to the corner of the lips. This is called the naso-labial line, and is found in every old face. I say again, that though you work for one hundred years as a printer you would probably never draw a delicate line like this. But if you should make studies in pencil and realize that this line is typical of old age, you would be able to put it in such a drawing as the Watts (the artist has used two lines to represent it), where, you will notice, it comes down about as far on the lower lip as in the Gaillard, and you would realize why it was left out in the Dagnan-Bouveret and Marchand younger subjects.

This chapter should be exceedingly interesting to you as indicating two things—one discouraging and the other encouraging. First, that when students of art have the opportunity to work so beautifully, as in the Bargue-Gérôme studies, and afterward from life, as in the Gaillard, they needs must see more than you do, and you must not expect to equal them if you, a busy printer, can only practice a few evenings a week. Therefore you should not attempt subtile renderings like the Gaillard, but should confine yourself to simple means. On the other hand, when I tell you that this is about all the study there is gone through with in an art school (I say about all, for besides blocking-in, students learn a good deal about values; this we shall treat of in a succeeding chapter), it should be interesting to you to realize that if you will simply train yourself to see light and shade like the plinth in the foot studies given in Chapter XII by drawing a pasteboard box, and then afterward draw from life, so as to see that hair is darker {81} in shaded portions than in light ones, and that in an old person the naso-labial line is marked and shows darker than the cheeks, you will, when copying a photograph for your paper, no matter how roughly you work, be able to indicate the shadows in the hair and the dark naso-labial line, as in the Watts portrait. This, I say, should encourage you, and it is the only way for you to learn to draw.