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| The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 6 Graphite Pencil and Ink on Paper 18.5cm x 14cm (7.25" x 5.5") |
The objective of Exercise 6 from John Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing is
not to draw a tree, but to learn how to do so
It is an exercise in accurately mapping out the overlapping branches of a tree. It has taken me months.
The key instructions are:
Choose any tree that you think pretty, which is nearly bare of leaves, and which you can see against the sky, or against a pale wall, or other light ground.
You will see that all the boughs of the tree are dark against the sky. Consider them as so many dark rivers, to be laid down in a map with absolute accuracy; and, without the least thought about the roundness of the stems, map them all out in flat shade, scrawling them in with pencil;
then correct and alter them, rubbing out and out again, never minding how much your paper is dirtied (only not destroying its surface), until every bough is exactly, or as near as your utmost power can bring it, right in curvature and in thickness.
Look at the white interstices between them with as much scrupulousness as if they were little estates which you had to survey, and draw maps of, for some important lawsuit, involving heavy penalties if you cut the least bit of a corner off any of them
Do not take any trouble about the little twigs, which look like a confused network or mist; leave them all out, drawing only the main branches as far as you can see them distinctly,
When you have got the thing as nearly right as you can, take your pen, and put a fine outline to all the boughs, taking care, as far as possible, to put the outline within the edge of the shade, so as not to make the boughs thicker: the main use of the outline is to affirm the whole more clearly;
I started this at the beginning of summer when the trees were fully leaved, so I worked from a photograph. This allowed me to strive for a level of accuracy that would have been impossible working from life - which is also why this has taken so long.
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| The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 6 - Just Getting Started Graphite Pencil on Paper 18.5cm x 14cm (7.25" x 5.5") |
I made a rooky mistake – I marked the quarters on the edge of the photograph. Drew a rectangle on my page and marked the quarters on that, but I was too casual in the alignment of the edges and the accuracy of my measuring. It took me a while to work out why the tree looked so out of whack and then make the necessary corrections. Note to self: if you are going to use a grid, do it properly or don’t bother.
