The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 5

The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 5
Graphite Pencil and Ink on Paper
5.5cm x 18cm (2.25" x 7")

Exercise 5 from John Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing is a fusion of the shading, accuracy and line drawing elements from the previous exercises.

Ruskin’s instructions are:

get a good large alphabet, and try to tint the letters into shape with the pencil point. Do not outline them first, but measure their height and extreme breadth … and then scratch in their shapes gradually

when you are satisfied with the shape of the letter, draw pen-and-ink lines firmly round the tint

The straight lines of the outline are all to be ruled, but the curved lines are to be drawn by the eye and hand

remove any touches outside the limit, first with the india-rubber, and then with the penknife, so that all may look clear and right. 

If you rub out any of the pencil inside the outline of the letter, retouch it, closing it up to the inked line. 

He doesn’t specify a grade of pencil. I used the 2H pencil he suggested for the previous exercise. 

I drew the whole outline free hand using a fineliner – I didn’t use a ruler for the straight edges. I was embarrassed by the wonkiness of the outlines. It’s difficult to balance the need for accuracy and the desire for flowing confident lines. The wobbling is caused by moving painstakingly slowly, but I know if I drew more fluently, I would stray even further from the line. Its a difficult balancing act and I am gradually improving.

Ruskin offers some timely and reassuring advice:

All these exercises are very irksome, and they are not to be persisted in alone; neither is it necessary to acquire perfect power in any of them.

it is quite possible to draw very beautifully, without attaining even an approximation to such a power [the skills of the old masters] 

the main point being, not that every line should be precisely what we intend or wish, but that the line which we intended or wished to draw should be right. 

If we always see rightly and mean rightly, we shall get on, though the hand may stagger a little; but if we mean wrongly, or mean nothing, it does not matter how firm the hand is.

 Do not therefore torment yourself because you cannot do as well as you would like; but work patiently, sure that every square and letter will give you a certain increase of power

Scratching in the B

I still prefer the letters before I added the wobbly outline. My favourite part of the process is scratching in the letters gradually without drawing an outline first.