This is a part of the series of posts I intend to write regarding sketching. I am an amateur at sketching, but I love the way I learnt to do it. The ways in which I understood how to sketch might be useful for anyone who is trying to learn this as a hobby. So, here we go :)…!
I am a student of science and I often learn things faster that way. There is quite a bit of science involved in sketching too. The world we see around us is full of illusions. The depth of objects, the texture, the shades, all of these are tricks played on us by our eyes. Being an artist is to understand these illusions, see through them and recreate them on a canvas/paper.
Let me dwell into the science of optics for a while. The key reason humans perceive the distance – which makes our world three dimensional is our binocular vision, the fact that we have two eyes, looking at an object from two slightly different angles gives us a very accurate measure of the distance. This is one of the ways astronomers calculate the distance to the planets, or the way we can calculate the distance to a tree across the river (I remember solving this problem at school – like this). We are programmed to use this concept in our day to day life.
Point the index finger of your right hand and try to touch it’s tip with the tip of the index finger of your left hand – with both your eyes open. Now repeat this with one of your eyes closed – it is slightly difficult. This is the first illusion.
The second and a very prominent illusion when we are sketching is in the way we perceive objects. We often have a mental picture of objects which we see in day to day life and we form a mental object for it. Often, it is solid, has a well defined contour and has a definite shape. In reality, we do not see these solids – rather what we see is the light bouncing off these solids. The way they appear to us is a factor of several things – the smoothness/reflexive properties of the solid, the way in which the light is falling on them and the place from which we are observing it.
Another key factor that is a part of this illusion is that the perceived shade/color of a certain area depends on the shade/color of it’s surrounding area. The color tile illusion and the checker shadow illusion are the two classic examples to prove this. Often, we tend to shade the way we feel the color seems to us in the midst of it’s surroundings. Once finished, we see that it feels quite different from the way the real object is. In the checker illusion, our mind tells us to shade the checker B with a lighter color compared to that of the checker A. In reality, we had to sketch them using the same shade.
With practice, you can see through these illusions, and recreate them on paper. Recreating the illusion gives us a way to create depth in the picture and make it look more realistic.
From here on, I will deal with handling pencil/charcoal portraits. Creating these is a matter of understanding the lighting – the shadowed regions and the highlighted regions. In high-contrast pictures, you can often recognize crisp contours. However, in the case of low-contrast pictures, you will have to solely work on the shadows and highlights to bring out the subject. This tends to be a real challenge since our mind plays tricks on us at this point since it assumes contours for us – where in reality, there are none.
The illusion of knowledge is often encountered when drawing the teeth.
We know that the teeth are separate entities, so we imagine a solid contour for these. When we draw them, the most common mistake people do is to assume this and draw solid lines separating the teeth. This results in an awkward looking smile. A lot of artists avoid sketching teeth for this reason. If we imagine teeth basically as the shadow regions between the teeth and the fact that the teeth becomes darker and blurred as we look at the teeth on the sides, we can do a better job. You can also see that the highlights given on the lips being out their thickness. The contours are usually blurry, there are no sharp curves which can create a crisp contour.
In the next post I will discuss how to create realistic eyes. I will be using the concepts discussed in this post to do so. For me, eyes are the most beautiful and important part of the face. They define the face and decide the shading for the rest of the face.