"First Steps" Exercises from DWM Videos

[Mike Sibley]

...I have been thinking about why ateliers do not teach the tapered stroke... My conclusion is that it's not taught because it's not necessary...

Oh, how mistaken can one person be?!!!

And not necessarily because of the first or obvious reason that springs to mind. This isn't going to be easy to explain, but... go on Lemming, over the cliff...

lemmings.jpg

I find the supplied tapered example unacceptable as an example of even shading. Yes it exhibits no "banding" but there are still dark and light islands which need attention. There is not a single person alive today who could lay down a perfectly smooth layer of graphite without those islands, and given that at some point you have to change your focus and begin to even out that shading.

Now that's helping me. It's all to do with concentration and focus. And, incidentally, I like those "islands" and wouldn't normally seek to remove them. If I was drawing photo-realistically, I might want to. But, personally, I like to retain the hand-drawn appearance while <i>suggesting</i> reality.

We attack the white islands first to fill them in - usually with circular strokes. Filling in the white islands first will make the image average a little darker, and some of what appear as dark islands now will disappear as our eye/brain takes in the new average image. Notice that most of the dreaded bands have disappeared or been absorbed into the average image - and we have NOT erased anything.

So far, so good. Although a little biased towards technique. But I'll return to that.

Second step is to remove the remaining dark islands, so we put down our pencil, pick up the... eraser and gently tap out the dark islands AND what remains of the bands... I spent exactly 5 minutes with each step, including the scanning.

So, that's 10 minutes? Well, that's 10 minutes of using techniques to repair other techniques.

If you'd used tapered lines, you would have spent 10 minutes deep in your world creating more of it.

...this is known as the POMODORO working technique, and the increased distance from the piece changes my focus to take in the whole image (my version of "What do you see?") and frankly it helps to improve the picture and the composition. So I don't mind having my focus disturbed every 25 minutes or whenever I finish a section and need to re-assess it...

That's not dissimilar from the way I work. My sections probably take around 30 minutes. At that point, I'll step back before moving to the next section. The difference is that my previous section is complete. Yes, I might make a couple of tiny value changes, but probably not. As a rule, it's done, and I will never return to it.

Why don't I just move straight on to the next section? Well, very often, my first task is to fade the guidelines to mere shadows and then more accurately redraw the guidelines. That permits me to modify them to better reflect the completed drawing so far. The initial guidelines fix positions. The later ones begin to introduce required details.

I did say this was going to be difficult to explain, didn't I?

Not using tapered lines results in "repair sessions". Removing the islands and filling in gaps and pits. Your concentration is on technical perfection and elegance.

Using the tapered line permits you to flow your thoughts onto paper without the need for correction or finessing.

I should point out that, until you mentioned it, I wasn't aware of the tapered line being widely taught. I didn't even know it had a name until Darrel Tank christened it the Tapered Stroke.

Well, a STROKE is a quick, uncontrolled movement. So, I call it the Tapered Line, which is far more deliberate.

In my case, the TAPERED LINE emerged as a <b>necessity</b>. It removed blunt ends from the drawing hair. And I drew almost nothing but hair for my first 12 professional years (52 dog head-studies plus commissions). When the later work went into Limited Edition prints involving scenic studies, the tapered line served me very well with the drawing of smooth skies. All shaded in overlapping sections. And, except for minimal blending to remove any vestiges of line, each section was completed and never returned to. The same is true of areas of sand, or any other smooth area.

TAPERS permit me to spontaneously recreate what I see in my mind. Where creating banding and then repairing that would alter my approach and thought processes from ARTIST to ENGINEER. The first creates, the second builds to plans or repairs.

Finally, when I'm drawing a shaggy dog and working my way down its front leg, I'm thinking "Well, the leg's moving forwards, and the light is shining from here... so this lock of hair is long enough to be affected by the air currents. It will lift and trail back here... And this one will bend back here....."

I'm <i>not</i> thinking, "I need to remove that gap... and I must fix that dark island, because it's looking very unnatural..."

No - I'm thinking, "Surely it would split here.... maybe this half would twist and flow back here...... beneath this one..... and there would be wispy ends where it tails off......"

First, the more techniques you know, the better. But, ultimately, you have to let those techniques become second-nature and move on. The goal is to work <i>without having to think about techniques</i> and just use them as you create.

And second, I wouldn't have created any "dark islands" that need removal, because I use tapered lines. And use them to describe what I'm seeing in my mind. And what I see there is totally natural, so my drawing will always reflect what I expect everything to look like in Nature.

I think I'm starting to waffle.... time to stop.

[wayneCol]

It appears that I've opened Pandora's box or touched a nerve.

My statement was "Atelier's don't teach the tapered stroke because it's not needed" and it probably should have been "Atelier's don't teach the tapered stroke because it's not needed for academic drawing" - I didn't include the latter phrase because I thought it was obvious that ateliers only teach academic drawing.

In academic drawing, form shadows are rendered with a flat unblemished value and no atelier would accept the example given with it's white and dark islands.

Now Mike Sibley doesn't do or teach academic art - he shows the techniques he uses to render realism, so of course we have "different strokes for different folks". The tapered stroke/line/curve is part of the Sibley-Tank-DrawSpace-PencilPerceptions toolkits but not part of the academic toolkit. I think that's a true statement and I stand by it - "mistaken" I don't think so!

[Mike Sibley]

...and it probably should have been "Atelier's don't teach the tapered stroke because it's not needed for academic drawing"

Now it's obvious.

Your background and approach fascinates me, because I'm self-taught and have no connection to Ateliers at all. In the UK, we might say I learnt at the coal face, not in the classroom. So, to me, the tapered line is something that developed from necessity, and I didn't see it as a thing until Darrel Tank named it.

In academic drawing, form shadows are rendered with a flat unblemished value and no atelier would accept the example given with its white and dark islands.

Understood. Except that, to me, that probably translates as "lifeless" rather than "unblemished". It appears to be perfection for perfection's sake.

Now Mike Sibley doesn't do or teach academic art - he shows the techniques he uses to render realism, so of course we have "different strokes for different folks"... not part of the academic toolkit. I think that's a true statement and I stand by it - "mistaken" I don't think so!

Academically speaking, you're absolutely correct. However, from my point of view, the "tapered line" was self-evolving over 40+ years of drawing, so it couldn't possibly be "unnecessary" or it never would have developed.

In fact, the concept of it being unnecessary came as a bit of a shock .... as you noticed.

I'm working on your PDFs today. I'll send you the results for approval later.

[wayneCol]

Your comment "It appears to be perfection for perfection's sake." is precisely what academic art is about. It attempts to continue the art traditions of ancient Greek and Roman art and the Renaissance. It has nothing to do with realism and as an example here is Bouguereau's painting "Girl Eating Porridge". In case you're not familiar with Bouguereau he was a French painter ( died in 1905 I think ) who was considered the finest painter in France and highly respected. Here's the picture

1024px-'Girl_Eating_Porridge'_by_William_Adolphe_Bouguereau,_Cincinnati_Art_Museum.JPG

Is there anything realistic about this - the girl's hair is clean and shiny, the clothes look new, her skin complexion faultless, her composure quiet and contented, the environment clean, she's even using a metal (not wooden ) spoon and she has food to eat. There isn't a single realistic thing about this scene - this is a peasant girl in rural France and that level of hard life poverty was only exceeded by conditions in English towns of the time. See any brushstrokes? The painted surface is faultless - just like daVinci's Mona Lisa!

So if it's so artificial why is academic art important and forming the basis of how ateliers teach art? Simple answer - it's objective, no interpretation required. Either the form shadow is unblemished or it isn't. Either the shape is correct or it isn't. Either the value is correct or it isn't. The edge is correct or it isn't. This is an almost perfect teaching model - the teacher/instructor teaches the techniques and objective reality evaluates the results.

This is a wonderful way to learn, but nobody draws or paints like that any more.

This is definitely NOT the Mike Sibley method of producing art! You have techniques too, evolved or well thought out, it doesn't matter. I'm simply trying to understand them, maybe adopt some of them, but to come up with a drawing process ( for ME ) that is a little more spontaneous than it is currently - to optimise MY process, but my only reference point is the academic tradition that I was trained in.

[wayneCol]

Well at long last here are the completed exercises for Week 2 of the Beginner's Book. Interestingly, on the original of this tapered stroke exercise the area where the tapers overlap is just barely visible as a slight lightening of value, so I marked the spot with the arrow at the bottom of the page. On the scanned image, you definitely don't need the arrow and I don't know why the scanning accentuates the join area so much.

week2_1.jpg

The second page ( "Lily" and leaves ) requires a little explanation. First off the botanist in me objects to you calling that flower a lily and here's why. All members of the Lily family share a bunch of characteristics, some of which are : 6 petals in 2 offset whorls, 6 equal stamens, and a superior pistil ( above the stamens ). Your flower has 6 petals Ok, 3 stamens (oops ), but the pistil is either missing or inferior to ( below ) the stamens. So it's not a lily, but it could be a new species that I have named ( in your honour as the discoverer )
demi-androidal gynaleptic non-lileus sibleus fantasticus
( half-male missing female imaginary sibley not-a-lily )

week2_2.jpg

I started the leaves on old wood by doing the leaves and a little bit of the old wood between the 2 leaves and between the leaf stem and the leaf. Then I realized that there is 35 square inches of white space left to fill with old wood. So "Treebeard" will have to do ...

treebeard.jpg

[Mike Sibley]

Layering and Blending
From the top down... The layering exhibits your usual, and indeed expected, skill of perfectly gradating values. Who needs automation or AI when you can have a Wayne.

Is that implying 2B OVER 6B? It has the appearance of the reverse - 6B over 2B. As a rule, hard over soft will work effectively 99.9% of the time. But soft over hard almost always fails to some extent. The same applies to HB over 2B, or 2B over HB, although the difference in effectiveness is usually slight.

I suspect your "Corner Blend" exercises are more subtly shaded than the scan shows. Blend Dark to Light does show the expected reduction in value of the top right-hand corner. Blending always removes graphite. However, despite the physical difficulties I know you're experiencing with tapering lines, you've managed to almost remove the banding that failing to taper produces.

The same applies to your two lowest boxes. Tapers are essential here - so overlapping layers merge seamlessly together. Any sign of a darker junction of the two halves is, I'm quite convinced, simply due to scanner contrast issues.

LILY

First off, the botanist in me objects to you calling that flower a lily, and here's why. All members of the Lily family share a bunch of characteristics, some of which are : 6 petals in 2 offset whorls, 6 equal stamens, and a superior pistil (above the stamens).

Well, there's a very good reason for that. This LILY is an extremely rare subspecies known as...

demi-androidal analeptic non-linius sibleus fantasticus (half-male missing female imaginary sibley not-a-lily)

Oh... so you already knew that!

Well, to be honest, I just grabbed a suitable image off the Internet, and made a few "artistic" changes:

LILY_REF-DRAW.jpg

But your description is fascinating, and quite obviously learned. I obviously did choose to omit the pistil. Although I think the three anthers sprung from me not knowing to expect six. But, that said, I actually prefer three from an artistic point of view.

I think your drawing is fine, but I would have made more use of cast shadows to clearly separate the petals. As you can partially see above, and markedly in SHADE and BLEND a LILY. You've used outline along edges where the line can convincingly represent the leaf's thickness. And your use of hard edges within the anthers contrasts really well with the softness of the petal behind them.

Finally, the overlapping lines of shading down from the top leaf and up from the lower leaf, flow into each other quite seamlessly.

It's difficult to see, but I think you decided to not use the "angled line"? That is, the act of creating a tapered line along the edge of the leaf, then changing direction to drop the line towards the lower leaf. And the same when drawing up from the lower leaf. That angled line removes any possibility of a dot forming, which can result from placing your pencil directly at the edge of a leaf and then drawing the line. The constant creating of tapered lines along the edge of each leaf also serves to keep their edges super-sharp.

And I don't blame you at all for ducking out of completing the entire surface of the wood!

[wayneCol]

Thanks for pointing out that 2B/6B box - there is definitely something wrong there - probably the labelling. Oh well, I do understand "hard over soft" and there is little danger of me reversing them in practice.

Personally, I think the tapering of the ends of the lines for me is working very well, but as you know I have a real problem tapering the start of the line. Fortunately for me, these exercises didn't require that.

On the leaves, I had completed them before I got your explanation of Brenda's sentence. So the space between the leaves was done "my way" but the spaces between the leaf and the stems was done with your "angles" and produced a much nicer result and a very hard edge to the stem which is exactly what we want to separate the 2 planes. So the "angle technique" goes into the toolbox - I'm assuming here that it was up for adoption!

[Mike Sibley]

So the "angle technique" goes into the toolbox - I'm assuming here that it was up for adoption!

Everything is up for adoption!

Unless, of course, you dispute its use, think there are better ways to accomplish the same task, or consider it complete madness. I'm quite happy to accept that. I'm not trying to create Sibley clones, just give you something to build your own techniques on.

[wayneCol]

Here are the Week Three exercises - well only 2 out of 3 - you'll see why in a moment.

myscan0001.jpg

For the third exercise, I started to do it when I realized that there is no way that I can understand how to get a cast shadow under the overhang on the shadow side of the house. I re-constructed the light direction from the cast shadows on the front end and with the light coming from that direction the roof should be lighter at the bottom, slightly darker at the ridge but I don't see it casting a shadow on the wall.

myscan0002.jpg

[Mike Sibley]

...when I realized that there is no way that I can understand how to get a cast shadow under the overhang on the shadow side of the house. I re-constructed the light direction from the cast shadows on the front end and with the light coming from that direction the roof should be lighter at the bottom, slightly darker at the ridge, but I don't see it casting a shadow on the wall.

OK, I like the way you're thinking. It's wrong... but good thinking nonetheless.

This is, I assure you, a matboard model made by me. It is illuminated by a single Anglepoise desk lamp. So the shadows and values are what you see.

However, it's perfect;y possible that a degree of <i>reflected light</i> was present. My Artograph was alongside, for example, and its body could easily have reflected some light. The same is true of the white ceiling. And I think it's reflected ceiling light that might be responsible for the even values of the roof, and the shadow cast by its overhang.

If I was to draw this, even if those shadows were NOT present, I would have created them. All three cast shadows offer visual clues that help tell the story, and clearly describe the three-dimensional nature of the "building".

As for the two completed exercises...

EXERCISE 1 is seriously good, especially as it's such a potentially boring exercise. I applaud you for your patience, although I've come to expect that of you.

This forms the basis of most forms of shading. Consistency is vital, and this exercise was designed to show you that. Any variance in the gaps between lines, the pressure you apply to lines, or the straightness of the lines is immediately apparent, as they always attract unwanted attention. And very few of yours do!

Here's a tip I'll mention, although you won't need it: If you are trying to draw two lines a pencil-width apart (or any narrow width), draw the first line and when you draw the second one, look at the GAP you're leaving and not at the line you're drawing. You are effectively drawing a white line between the two, so if you look at that, the feedback between your brain and hand will be about the width of that white line and not about the one you're drawing. The same applies when you try to draw a line in between two others.

EXERCISE 2 This is near-perfect as I've ever seen! Your midtone lines of shading taper to white at the right-hand side. And your lines of shading properly follow the contours of the cylinder, so any that remain visible after blending will read as surface texture.

Your vertical black shading at the left-hand side could have been stronger, but that's probably just personal preference. As it is, it's consistent, smoothly applied, devoid of gaps, and lightens really well as it progresses to the right. Establishing a stronger dark tone at the left-hand edge would have boosted the brightness of the highlighted right-hand side.

And it's blended as well as I thought it would. I usually state that when you're shading and intend to blend, it's your initial careful application that counts. But, as expected, your shading is perfectly consistent, smooth and devoid of gaps. It's a super result.

"demi-androidal gynaleptic non-lileus sibleus fantasticus", eh? I'm still bathing in my new-found plant-explorer glory. Thanks for that.