The ART of THICK PAINT

22. Drawing

Painting can be a complicated process with many steps leading to a great painting. One important step for most painters is the preliminary sketch. Some of my favorite painters routinely used a preliminary sketch so I followed their footsteps even though I didn't fully understand why. There were times when I felt the sketch was repetitive and sapped energy from the finished work. But I persisted and finally came to realize the importance of the sketch.

In the sketching phase you should be exploring compositional options and clarifying your thinking. Thumbnails are best to explore options as they are fast. Sometimes I get caught up in detail so the small size of a thumbnail sketch helps keep things simple. Do as many sketches as needed to resolve the questions you have. One reason I didn't understand the use of a good sketch was I was unaware of which qualities of a sketch would translate into a good painting. Occasionally you will fall in love with a complex, linear sketch that won't lead to a good painting. Discernment, knowing which drawings will make good paintings, will improve as you practice the process.

If you make a larger sketch be sure not to invest too much time or make it too precious. You want a working document that you can change without reservation. Remember to start with generalities and work toward details. I like to stop short of including too many details as I find that finishing the sketch exhausts my enthusiasm and I want to preserve as much spontaneity as possible.

I had read somewhere that painting is simply drawing in paint. I was very enthused by this idea because as a woodcut artist I had trained myself, via the brute force of drawing for thousands of hours, to draw quite well. Due to the many hours spent drawing I can draw whatever I see, with varying degrees of accuracy depending on how much time I spend. However, when it came time to put paint on canvas I discovered that there was definitely more to it than that. So what is drawing's relationship to painting? In its most elementary application drawing is measuring. You are measuring the angles of shapes and the size of shapes. You are adding detail within those shapes in the appropriate place. All of this depends on getting the spatial relationships correct. Thinking about drawing as getting proper spatial relationships is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately many people think of drawing as getting an outline, getting an appealing line quality, or a smattering of interesting textural flecks within a shape. None of these concerns have any relevance to painting. If you get all of these quantities in your preliminary sketch you have done none of the essential thinking necessary in order to proceed to the painting stage with more confidence.

So what information do you need in a sketch, and therefore in your head, in order to paint a great painting? Spatial relationships are primary. The details within shapes are of lesser importance so the first thing to do is establish three to five value zones in your sketch. Initially just draw simple, descriptive lines around these shapes. If you focus just on the silhouettes you will find it is much easier to get a pleasing shape. Worrying about interior detail is a distraction. Draw a line around where the sky is, where the mountain range is, where the land plane is, and where the trees are. These four shapes should fit nicely together creating an interesting pattern of silhouettes. At this point no one is going to look at your sketch and admire its line quality. Neither should you. You are attempting to design the basic elements of a painting, not create a work of art in itself. In fact the more it looks like finished art the more it might inhibit further development. Keep things rough and focus on the process, like building a proper foundation. Think of it like sculpting; first you rough out the block and then add detail. Adding detail first to a block of stone would be a waste of energy.