The Component Skills of Drawing

When demonstrating watercolor painting, I often find it pretty difficult to describe what I'm actually doing. It 'just happens'. Often this isn't too much of a problem, and students get a sense of what you are doing. But last week, when one of my art group tried to recreate my wet-in-wet flower drawing, she found it very frustrating. Her shapes were outlined, and I realised that because she hadn't done much drawing yet, it was 'seeing' that was the problem, not the handling of the paint. In particular, she needed to understand negative spaces. Those who'd already done negative space drawing made the connection immediately, and were able to use the technique. Without the existing framework (negative space drawing) to 'hang' this technique onto, my demonstration was meaningless. This led me to thinking about the skills involved in drawing, and how we need to identify the component parts in order to learn them.

Competency-based training has been around for quite a while, with skills being broken up into manageable components to be ticked off on an assessment sheet. Sometimes, this is easy: Making a cup of coffee is a classic example used to show the approach: Place one teaspoon of coffee in mug. Fill kettle with water. Switch kettle on. Once boiling, turn off kettle. Pour water to 1cm below rim of mug. Stir with teaspoon. You get the idea - an activity is broken up into all its component stages. If you perform each stage, you pass the assessment. (This doesn't allow much room for flair, creativity or personality - that's a whole different story!) The approach is an effective one, despite its limitations, but most art teaching seems caught up in the showmanship of Art and has forgotten about craftsmanship.

So how do we break drawing up into its component actions? I've made a bit of a list so far:

• Seeing
  • Identifying edges
  • Perceiving three dimensional space
  • Differentiating hues (seeing colors)
  • Differentiating values (light and dark, shades of gray)
• Remembering: Retaining the observed information in the mind
• Translating: Transferring the information from the observed, three-dimensional world onto the two-dimensional picture plane.
• Recording
  • Defining linear shapes and planes
  • Reproducing colors and values

This is a bit of a work-in-progress, but its a step in the right direction. Once you start to break the process up into these component parts, you begin to find that drawing is not such a mysterious process. You can then ask, 'what happens when I look at values? What are my eyes perceiving, what does my mind do with this information?' and discover ways to develop your skills, or to communicate your skills to students.