Pen Drawing: An Illustrated Treatise

by Charles Donagh Maginnis

FIG. 42	GEORGE F. NEWTON

But the beginner should not yet hurry on to whole subjects. A church porch, as in Fig. 35, or a dormer with its shadow cast on a roof, as in Fig. 43, will be just as beneficial a study for him as an entire building, and will afford quite as good an opportunity for testing his knowledge of the principles of pen drawing, with the added advantage that either of the subjects mentioned can be mapped out in a few minutes, and that a failure or two, therefore, will not prove so discouraging as if a more intricate subject had to be re-drawn. I have known promising beginners to give up pen and ink drawing in despair because they found themselves unequal to subjects which would have presented not a few difficulties to the experienced illustrator. When the beginner grows faint-hearted, let him seek consolation and encouragement in the thought that were pen drawing something to be mastered in a week or a month there would be small merit in the accomplishment.

FIG. 43	C. D. M.

A General System It is a common fault of students to dive into the picture unthinkingly, beginning anywhere, without the vaguest plan of a general effect, whereas it is of the utmost importance that every stroke of the pen be made with intelligent regard to the ultimate result. The following general method will be found valuable.

Pencil the outline of the entire subject before beginning the pen work. It will not do to start on the rendering as soon as the building alone is pencilled out, leaving the accessories to be put in as one goes along. The adjacent buildings, the foliage, and even the figures must be drawn—carefully drawn—before the pen is taken up. The whole subject from the very beginning should be under control, and to that end it becomes necessary to have all the elements of it pre-arranged.

Arrangement of the Values Next scheme out the values. This is the time to do the thinking. Do not start out rashly as soon as everything is outlined in pencil, confident in the belief that all windows, for instance, are dark, and that you may as well make them so at once and be done with them. This will be only to court disaster. Besides, all windows are not dark; they may be very light indeed. The color value of nothing is absolute. A shadow may seem almost black till a figure passes into it, when it may become quite gray by comparison. So a window with the sun shining full upon it, or even one in shade, on which a reflected light is cast, may be brilliantly light until the next instant a cloud shadow is reflected in it, making it densely black. Arrange the values, therefore, with reference to one general effect, deciding first of all on the direction of the light. Should this be such as to throw large areas of shadow, these masses of gray will be important elements in the color-scheme. An excellent way to study values is to make a tracing-paper copy of the line drawing and to experiment on this for the color with charcoal, making several sketches if necessary. After having determined on a satisfactory scheme, put fixatif on the rough sketch and keep it in sight. Otherwise, one is liable, especially if the subject is an intricate one, to be led astray by little opportunities for interesting effects here and there, only to discover, when too late, that these effects do not hang together and that the drawing has lost its breadth. The rough sketch is to the draughts man what manuscript notes are to the lecturer.

Treatment of Detail Do not be over-conscious of detail. It is a common weakness of the architectural draughts man to be too sophisticated in his pictorial illustration. He knows so much about the building that no matter how many thousand yards away from it he may stand he will see things that would not reveal themselves to another with the assistance of a field-glass. He is conscious of the fact that there are just so many brick courses to the foot, that the clapboards are laid just so many inches to the weather, that there are just so many mouldings in the belt course,—that everything in general is very, very mathematical. This is not because his point of view is too big, but because it is too small. He who sees so much never by any chance sees the whole building. Let him try to think broadly of things. Even should he succeed in forgetting some of these factitious details, the result will still be stiff enough, so hard is it to re-adjust one's attitude after manipulating the T-square. I strongly recommend, as an invaluable aid toward such a re-adjustment, the habit of sketching from Nature,—from the figure during the winter evenings, and out of doors in summer.

FIG. 44	C. D. M.

The beginner is apt to find his effects at first rather hard and mechanical at the best, because he has not yet attained that freedom of handling which ignores unimportant details, suggests rather than states, gives interesting variations of line and tone, and differentiates textures. A good part of the unpleasantness of effect will undoubtedly be found to be due to a mistaken regard for accuracy of statement, individual mouldings being lined in as deliberately as in the geometrical office drawings, and not an egg nor a dart slighted. Take, for example, the case of an old Colonial building with its white cornice, or any building with white trimmings. See the effect of such a one in an "elevation" where all the detail is drawn, as in "A," Fig. 44. Observe that the amount of ink necessary to express this detail has made the cornice darker than the rest of the drawing, and yet this is quite the reverse of the value which it would have in the actual building, see "B." To obtain the true value the different mouldings which make up the cornice should be merely suggested. Where it is not a question of local color, however, this matter of elimination is largely subject to the exigencies of reproduction; the more precisely and intimately one attempts to render detail, the smaller the scale of the technique requires to be, and the greater the difficulty. Consequently, the more the reduction which the drawing is likely to undergo in printing, the more one will be obliged to disregard the finer details. These finer details need not, however, be absolutely ignored. Notice, for instance, the clever suggestion of the sculpture in the admirable drawing by Mr. F. E. Wallis, Fig. 45. The conventional drawing of the façade, Fig. 46, is a fine illustration of the decorative effect of color obtainable by emphasizing the organic lines of the design.

FIG. 45	FRANK E. WALLIS