The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 2

Wild Tulip
The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 2
Ink on Paper
25cm x 10cm (10" x 4")

Exercise 2 from John Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing is about copying an outline drawing of a plant.

Ruskin recommends Baxter's British Flowering Plants.

I found on online copy of British Phænogamous Botany; Or, Figures and Description of The Genera of British Flowering Plants by William Baxter, but it’s not very inspiring. The illustrations aren’t just outlines. Most of the drawings have hatch line shading and are partially obscured with watercolour. 

The exercise has three almost distinct parts. The instructions for the first part are:

Copy any of the simplest outlines, first with a soft pencil, following it, by the eye, as nearly as you can; if it does not look right in proportions, rub out and correct it, always by the eye, till you think it is right.

I picked an image of a Tulip. 

Tulipa Sylvestris, The Wild Tulip

This is my first attempt at the outline:

Wild Tulip - Outline 1
The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 2
Pencil on Paper25cm x 10cm (10" x 4")

The next step is 

lay tracing-paper on the book; on this paper trace the outline you have been copying, and apply it to your own; and having thus ascertained the faults, correct them all patiently, till you have got it as nearly accurate as may be. 

Instead of using tracing paper I overlayed the two drawings in Gimp (a free image editing package). This is my first outline (in red) superimposed on the original.

Assessing Outline 1

It took me 5 passes to get to this.

Assessing Outline 5

This is as accurate as I am going to achieve. Eventually, you get to a point of diminishing returns because depending on how you line up the drawings a part that looked good in the previous comparison, suddenly looks worse.

The third part is to draw the image in ink:

take a quill pen, not very fine at the point; rest your hand on a book about an inch and a half thick, so as to hold the pen long; and go over your pencil outline with ink, raising your pen point as seldom as possible, and never leaning more heavily on one part of the line than on another.

As soon as you can copy every curve slowly and accurately, you have made satisfactory progress; but you will find the difficulty is in the slowness. It is easy to draw what appears to be a good line with a sweep of the hand, or with what is called freedom; the real difficulty and masterliness is in never letting the hand be free, but keeping it under entire control at every part of the line.

The point of the exercise is:

The power to be obtained is that of drawing an even line slowly and in any direction

The pen should, as it were, walk slowly over the ground, and you should be able at any moment to stop it, or to turn it in any other direction, like a well-managed horse.

Ruskin bemoans:

 In most outline drawings of the present day, parts of the curves are thickened to give an effect of shade; all such outlines are bad,

I embraced the aim of the exercise, but I balked at the use of a quill and resting my hand on a book. I tried a variety of fountain pens and fineliners and contrived a hand position which allowed me to “hold the pen long” while lightly resting my wrist on the paper. The image at the top was drawn with a fineliner - which is probably cheating. My plan is to get the hang of using a fineliner for the exercise and then try using a dip pen.