Electrical Tape Drawings

This workshop uses electrical tape to draw architectural forms. Rather than a line wondering from it's starting point, the line is ready formed and placed. This can create a completely different drawing experience. It also encourages simplification and visual editing.

Wordplay

Tom Philips - The Humument

e.e. cummings

Drawing IS Thinking - Milton Glaser

Some very pertinent thoughts on why we draw, how we learn to draw and what the point of it all is anyway. Glaser states:

"for me, drawing has always been a primary way of encountering reality"

He discusses drawing not as a way to think and to perceive rather than just to represent  Here he talks about his book Drawing is Thinking. This book illustrates the Glaser's commitment to the fundamental idea that drawing is not simply a way to represent reality, but a way to understand and experience the world.

 

Niels Klim's journey under the ground by baron Ludvig Holberg

Louis Holberg's 1741 science fiction / fantasy / utopian / satirical novel derides his contemporary 18th century society while drawing inspiration from Thomas More's Utopia and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. It was considered too radical for Nordic culture, so the first edition was published in Latin in Germany where it circulated to a much wider audience and its popularity ensured it was quickly translated into a number of languages.

Parrots at BibliOdyssey

A taster from the always wonderful BibliOdyssey.

Here are the reliminary drawings for Edward Lear's book ''Illustrations of the family of Psittacidae, or parrots: the greater part of them species hitherto unfigured, containing forty-two lithographic plates, drawn from life, and on stone' 1832  You can see the final plates here.

Edward Lear was TWENTY YEARS OLD when his Parrot book was published!!

Edward Lear Sketches of Parrots Relating to 'Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots' (1832), ca. 1830 (MS Typ 55.9). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Berger on Drawing

You should all have read (or watched - it was a TV series) or at least heard of and about to read John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing' - I will write a post about this later. However, more relevant to the 1st Years 'Drawing Object' project is his less well know book 'On Drawing'. Below are a few excerpts that really rang true with the way that I think about drawing.

- “For the artist drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase, it is quite literally true. It is the actual act of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind’s eye and put it together again; or, if he is drawing from memory, that forces him to dredge his own mind, to discover the content of his own store of past observations.” (page 3)

- “A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – seen, remembered or imagined.” (page 3)

- “It is a platitude in the teaching of drawing that the heart of the matter lies in the specific process of looking. A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

John Berger [2005]: Berger on Drawing. Edited by Jim Savage. Aghabullogue, Co. Cork, Eire: Occasional Press. Second Edition, 2007.