Pointy End Goes on the Paper: Part 3

Pointy End Goes on the Paper: Beginning Drawing for the SCA Scribal Arts

Scribal culture in each kingdom throughout the known world is unique. As I am Trimarian, I approach things from that perspective. But my hope is that anyone interested in Medieval Illumination can find some inspiration and tidbits in this series of articles which will be helpful.

Part 3: Sketching

So let's get down to brass tacks here. How does one, in fact, learn to draw?

The answer, surprisingly enough, is to first learn how to sketch.

Give someone new to drawing a pencil and watch them go, and you notice something. A lot of people starting out do one of a few things: 

• They try to draw an outline of whatever it is they are trying to draw
• They get bogged down in details
•  Inevitably when they get partway through a drawing and they notice that their proportions are off because they have been trying to draw one continuous outline or series of details, they get frustrated.

 Practically, this goes a little like this:

(Please forgive the quality of the video, this is me trying to learn how to use my husband's go-pro)

Now I'm fairly decent at drawing, and I can't even draw well this way. And it's actually kinda hard to even make myself draw this way anymore. Nowadays, when I start a new drawing, I sketch first. And every single person I know who does draw well also has a solid understanding of sketching.

So what is sketching? The dictionary definition is "a rough or unfinished drawing or painting, often made to assist in making a more finished picture." And let's be realistic for a minute... Not a single artistic master ever drew exactly what they meant to draw first stroke to finish. They erased, they smudged lines, and they painted over themselves. Until someone invents a technology which will allow a computer to download a pictorial idea directly from someone's brain and render it in perfect detail, that level of execution will never happen. No matter how good you are. 

And to prove my point, lets look at one of those Masters... Leonardo da Vinci. 

"The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist"
National Gallery in London. 1499 - 1508

Posting this picture on a blog just does not do it justice. I had the honor of seeing it in person at the National Gallery in London long before I joined the SCA, and it has always stuck with me. Imagine, if you will, this picture is over six feet tall and hanging on a wall in front of you. You look up, in order to look at the faces, but your eyes are caught by movement and line. At such large a scale, the details which are lost in this poor online facsimile jump out at you. So much of the work is incomplete, but you can see the energy and intent of it. Stray lines are everywhere, clearly not meant to stay but still somehow adding something to the piece. 

This is the art and goal of sketching. Not a finished piece, never a finished piece, but something that catches your intent. An amalgam of lines that together illustrate avenues for refinement and detail. Notice in the above St. Anne's hand, a blank void with just a hint of fingers. But can't you just imagine it completed? And the feet... Mary's left foot doesn't even have the correct number of toes, but the positioning is good and the toes can be corrected later. 

Study of Horse and Rider

Here is another one. Notice the two different positions of the rider's head, cohabiting space until the artist decides which one he likes better. The rear legs of the horse are just the barest impression of movement. The rider's hand is barely more than a squiggle, and yet it is easy to see the future position of palm and fingers. 

In both of these examples you do see areas of detail that look more like a finished work. However those details would have been added after the bones of the entire picture had been sketched. This is how you keep your proportions, well, in proportion. Essentially what sketching allows you to do is draft out the entire picture, making sure the proportions are right and everything is arranged more or less how you want. Then you use the sketch as the skeleton underpinning your finished drawing. You build details on top of it, like muscle and sinew. You erase stray lines as needed, darkening the lines you want to keep like pulling a layer of skin over your art.

And while I veer into the slightly gory metaphor, it is worth mentioning that the reason Leonardo da Vinci was so good at drawing anatomy is he did exactly that.

Anatomical drawings

One of the things Leonardo did which was rather unusual for artists of his time was study anatomy in depth, way in depth. As in, he did his own dissections and studied the human form from the inside out, all with no formal medical training. His anatomical drawings are incredibly detailed and show a sophisticated understanding of how everything was put together. Leonardo could literally draw a skeleton, cover it in muscles and other tissue, and then skin. There is a reason the final human forms in his paintings are so life-like.

So now that this post has turned into me utterly fan-girling all over Leonardo da Vinci, what are the key take-aways I'd like you to absorb here?

• Draw lightly- any given line might get erased later
• Don't get bogged down in details
• Draft your entire layout first, then add detail 
• Don't erase until it starts to take shape and you are refining the piece, stray lines are normal 

 "Ok," you say, "But how do I actually do that?" 

For that, stay tuned for Part 4: Sketching How-to
Previous post: Part 2: The Basics