It is, therefore, wise to make a note of a place and return when it is more convenient. Wait for a sunny day, the right light, or for the tourists to go to bed. Remember, you need a quiet spot for drawing.
For a change of pace, try an unusual time of day. Some places can only be drawn at seven in the morning.
Museums
Nothing is more likely to spoil your drawing than rain.
So use a rainy day—especially when traveling —for a trip to the local museum. From small local history and folklore museums to large inter-national collections, almost all museums offer something worth drawing. Old museums in particular offer a fascinating atmosphere and exciting glimpses into the past. Of course, it is also a good opportunity to learn something.
Tip:
Museums usually prohibit photography but permit drawing. In most museums, it is the flash that is forbidden because it could damage the exhibits. You won’t need that for drawing.
Panoramas
Draw from high above. You can almost always find a place from which you have a panoramic view. Look for a nearby hill, a tower, or a high building and draw from there.
Tip:
For urban panoramas, always start with a large building in the foreground and use it to gauge the sizes of the surrounding buildings. Shut one eye and measure (“the dome on the left is as high as seven steps on the staircase”).
Trifles and truffles
Sketchbooks are suitable for more than just big panoramas; even small details have narrative power. For example, put interesting facts about your destination country in your drawings.
It can be directions, vocabulary, or anything you encounter every day, like food. Jot down recipes and draw the ingredients and results! Everyday tools are also good subjects.
Make use of the time you spend waiting in a restaurant for your meal to draw other guests or details. If you use the opportunity to write down a few lines about the flavor of foods and beverages, you’ll add another interesting level of narrative.
Reality is not reality is not reality
If you are asking yourself how realistically you should portray your subject, you’re skating on very thin ice.
There is not just one reality. There is only one’s own perspective, which can be very different depending on who you are. One man’s freedom fighter is the other’s terrorist. “Reality” is a compromise among many ways of seeing. Hence, realistic drawing is more like the smallest common denominator than any actual reality. Instead, think about what you want to convey. If it is important to you to portray the tiniest details of your subject, then you ought to make an effort to be precise. If instead you want to illustrate a frame of mind or a movement, you will probably do better to draw with more expression.
Even a seemingly hyperrealistic drawing is not realistic if it does not suit the subject. Conversely, a hastily scribbled sketch can adequately render reality— information about a mood, for instance —without being objectively realistic. As contradictory as it may sound, even reality is not very realistic.
Tip:
No one is keeping you from mixing different perspectives in one drawing. For example, try painting everything that moves abstractly, and everything standing still realistically. You’ll be amazed at the results.
Everything is in flux
A sketch is not merely an illustration of reality. A sketch is a piece of time.
A moment flashes by and is gone forever: only you experienced it that way. Everything moves and nothing ever returns. The irretrievable has always frightened people and we have devised many strategies to counter it.
One way to remember something is to convey the moment to others, such as in stories or— in our case—in drawings. The special thing about a sketch is that it captures time. A drawing not only illustrates, it also documents its own genesis. While you experienced the scene, you drew it. This makes sketches precious, because you “charge” them with the moment. Later viewers are given something immediate to look at; they are given a glimpse of a moment that has passed. Even if your drawing is not perfect, it is a genuine piece of time that will never be repeated.
Redoing drawings
Have you ever attempted to redo one of your drawings, or to copy one? Oddly enough, it almost never works out right. With every new attempt, the same drawing becomes flatter and more tepid. It’s as if you cannot reproduce the directness and spontaneity of a sketch. Even if you think you might do better on this eye or that nose the second time around, the price you pay for a better new nose is often a worse new mouth.
For this reason, the ability to process sketches on the computer is a fantastic stroke of luck. Earlier generations of illustrators had only manual re-drawing or tracing at their disposal to remove a sketch from their book (if they did not want to tear out pages).
Today, you can scan your pictures and continue processing them. You can make them part of a picture or an illustration, or blend them with other pictorial elements. This allows you to preserve the immediacy that might otherwise be lost through multiple copies. The sketch above, for example, was scanned into Photoshop and combined with two other sketches and a colored layer to produce an editorial illustration about Istanbul (shown opposite).
Yet in spite of all of these possibilities, remember that your drawing is just as unique as the moment in which you made it. So handle it carefully.
Using digital media
It is true that, in recent years, computers have supported the revival of drawing. As long as it was technically impossible to produce hyperrealistic images, it seemed incredibly desirable to attempt to do so using drawing and illustration. Consider photorealism in the 1970s or the airbrush paintings of the 1980s.
Then suddenly, with the development of fast graphic computers, it became possible to bring illusions to life. Dinosaurs and creatures of fantasy were animated. For a while there, traditional techniques seemed incredibly old-fashioned.
In the meantime, however, we have recognized that digital images often appear too “perfect,” pushing the personal touch to the sidelines. The strength of drawings lies in ideas, content, and expressiveness.
It is the personal touch that makes a sketch exciting. When it takes full advantage of its actual strengths, drawing is an ideal interface to the new technologies. With computers we can edit and transform drawings to any imaginable size, color, and format. They can be serially and sequentially generated, processed into films and animations, and combined with other image media such as typography and text.
In other words, don’t hesitate to further develop your sketches on the computer. The results will profit from the mix!
Whatever happened to da Vinci’s sketchbook?
In closing, I would like to say a few words about all the sketchbooks that were produced in past centuries—and where they ended up.
Whatever happened to Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbook? The answer: it no longer exists. After his death, Leonardo’s sketchbooks and notebooks were torn apart and scattered around the world. The only volume that was preserved, the more than one thousand–page Codex Atlanticus, was later re-compiled by collectors and re-bound. Today it is at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Many sketchbooks suffered the fate of being looted (single pages are easier to sell), although some by Dürer and Rembrandt were preserved. Beginning in the nineteenth century, sketchbooks were collected; you can still purchase facsimiles of the sketchbooks of artists like J. M. W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich. The sketchbooks of more modern painters have also been largely preserved in one piece (if they haven’t been stolen, as was recently the case with a sketchbook from Pablo Picasso in Paris…).
Today, many artists regularly publish their sketchbooks on the Internet. Visits to the countless blogs and sketch websites are always worthwhile. But despite all of the publication possibilities, the sketchbook still remains something intimate and personal. It remains a field of experimentation and of trial and error. It remains a notebook and a diary.
And yet, the
most important of them all is your own sketchbook, and the sketchbooks to come— the sketchbook you will begin next!
Appendix
About the author
Felix Scheinberger is an illustrator, artist, and designer. He is the author and illustrator of three books on watercolor and has illustrated more than fifty books in the last decade. His work has appeared in many magazines, including Harvard Business Manager and Psychology Today. Felix is a professor at the Münster School of Design and lives in Berlin, Germany.
Also by the author
Urban Watercolor Sketching
Bring new energy to your sketches of urban scenes with this fresh and simple approach to watercolor painting. Whether you’re an amateur artist, drawer, doodler, or sketcher, watercolor is a versatile sketching medium that’s perfect for people on the go. Felix Scheinberger offers a solid foundation in color theory and countless lessons on all aspects of watercolor sketching. Vibrant watercolor paintings grace each page, and light-hearted anecdotes make this a lively guide to the medium.
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