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

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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