Drawing to Painting, Part 1

There is something inherently fascinating about artists’ sketchbooks. Pages of scribblings, ideas, loose lines, smudges and spontaneous musings. The sketchbook is the beginning of a dialogue, a way of seeking and finding. Drawing in any form, builds trust between your hand and your eye. When you sketch, you are creating new connections in your brain and building cognitive skills, like visual perception and spatial awareness. You are training your eyes to deliver visual information to your brain, which, in turn, communicates with your hand. All of this adds up to better painting! 

A sketchbook is a personal account of imagery, real or imagined. Sometimes, it can store and collect information that is later manifested into larger works. Below, an image from Cy Twombly's North African Sketchbook. His unique language of marks, a personal handwriting developed over a lifetime, is unmistakable. 

Cy Twombly, Untitled (North African Sketchbook), Part XXIV, Rome, 1953

Keeping a sketchbook and practicing mark making or creating loose observations from life, can transform the appearance, language, and sensibility of your paintings. Drawing affects how you hold your brush, the pressure with which you might apply paint, the placement of your forms and the flow of your compositions. Below, are two examples from Richard Diebenkorn's sketchbooks. It feels as if the artist's mind and hand were free to wander from one idea to the next without judgment. There are hundreds of attempts at shape making, line quality and composition within the safe atmosphere of the modest drawing pad. 

Sketching allows us to experiment without the commitment of the big blank canvas. We can easily tune-in to the flow of creativity. 

Richard Diebenkorn sketchbooks

Because drawing is our thoughts made visible, it is almost never about finishing. When we are not focused on a finished product we able to remain very open minded about our results. Drawing is about ideas. It's about trying things out, sorting things out, not stressing about outcome. It's an incubator for expanding your sensibilities. 

A contemporary drawing practice can be expansive, responsive, organic and experimental. Contemporary drawing can veer off from learning about the classic rules of line, shading, contour and perspective. All of these rules can be picked over, reinvented, or used to the artist's desire. Below, another example from Diebenkorn's sketchbook and a large work on canvas that retains the spontaneous language of line. 

A Diebenkorn ink sketch and a large oil painting.  Albuquerque #10,  57 1/8 x 44 7/8 in., Oil on Canvas, 1951

Drawing is our first mark, our first language. It comes naturally; we scribble and express, without fear of evaluation. You don't need to know how to render objects exactly, or make realistic forms to benefit from a drawing practice. Even loose observations can improve your hand/eye coordination. When you begin to trust your eye, you learn to see in new ways. 

Below, the work of contemporary painter, Ingrid Ellison. On the left, a journal entry depicts the process of recording and reflecting upon the natural world. The lines wander off towards the edge of the page. Some are thick, some thin and fleeting. The shape is reminiscent of the dried flower but remains open to other possible directions.

As a journal entry, the form is flexible, a study. Less a final thought, then an open-ended inquiry.

On the right, an oil painting on plywood. This piece feels like a transition from drawing to painting. Revealing the texture and rawness of the board, it retains the fresh, experimental feeling of working on paper. However, the paint layer, with its vibrant color and sometimes opaque, sometimes transparent texture, feels more decisive and final. The secret language of seed pods and stems weaves together underneath a flat, citrus yellow silhouette. More than a depiction, it captures a feeling of things bursting forth. The working out of ideas through sketching can show up in your painting in unexpected ways.

Ingrid Ellison, sketchbook and acrylic painting on panel, Seed Cycle, 20x16

If you choose to make observations from life, learning to see is going to increase your knowledge about volume, value and space. These elements are essential to any kind of drawing or painting. They are the underlying structure of any work of art and a key element of composition.

However, your impressions of a thing, even random marks in response to looking, is also highly beneficial. Below is another work by Ingrid Ellison, incorporating line, shape and paint on a canvas drop cloth. This much larger piece bridges the gap between drawing and painting. Using a wide variety of marks, tools and paint applications on canvas, it feels like a sketch fleshed out and developed into a significant piece of work. 

 Ingrid Ellison, Row Vigorously, 44x144", acrylic, oil, textiles, glitter, pencil on canvas drop cloth

You don't have to share your drawings with an audience. Think of drawing as a personal record, a journal, that sparks your imagination. Drawing is an opportunity to move your hands and relax into generating a personal language of smudges, dots, outlines and shapes.

The value of a drawing practice, when we return to our painting, is hard to quantify. Will you stop a line sooner? Will your shapes remain more open? Will your painting maintain its liveliness? Will you become naturally more aware of the movement in your paintings? 

British painter, Max Wade, keeps small sketchbooks full of quick abstract drawings that inform his larger works on canvas. These valuable explorations are both intuitive and observed renderings of shapes. They are crosshatched, erased, solid and soft, building a wealth of compositional ideas for future paintings.  

A sketchbook and a painting by Max Wade, Flight, oil on canvas 150x180 cm. 

Whether you begin by doodling or following the contours of the objects right in front of you, that line work begins to live in your hand. When you carry that back to your painting, the sensibility of that line naturally appears. Thick or thin, steady or broken, irregular or smooth, all lines add volume and interest to your painting. It creates the lifeforce energy in your work that is necessary to keep it feeling alive. 

Working loosely from the figure in my studio

When we get stuck in our paintings and don't know what to do next, many times, it is a gestural line that gets us unstuck and enables us to move forward with the work. When you maintain a drawing practice, your paintings will change in unexpected ways that you could never have anticipated.

I like the way French surrealist painter Andre Masson said it,  “With a pencil and white sheet of paper to hand…I would plunge into it, convinced that I would find my way again, in a maze of lines which at first glance would seem to go nowhere. And, upon opening my eyes, I would get the very strong impression of something never seen.”