Underdrawing

I'm certain you've seen it before in "How to draw" books, right? Some people call it the "sausage" method, others call it "rubber hose" some people call it "spheres and pears", but in the end, these are all just different forms of the same fundamental concept: Construction. And construction is a subset of methods used in a technique called underdrawing.

Basically, underdrawing is any technique of plotting out a finished piece. It's usually very light, and so simple only the creator knows what the marks mean. Often, underdrawing is made with such light marks, the artist doesn't even need (or bother) to erase them.

The method a given individual uses is usually somewhat unique to the individual. Some people break an image down into flat, simplified outlines of general shapes, which are drawn over repeatedly, increasing in complexity over time. Other people can simplify their thoughts into a collection of dots on the page, marking off borders and balances. Some people vaguely mark the paper, generalizing and guessing over and over again, emphasizing marks that work, and sometimes erasing the ones that don't, until they feel it's "finished". Most artists will use different methods depending upon their mood and subject.

Now, there's infinite ways of doing it, but those are the extremes I've seen.

In regards to all of them, any mark made as part of underdrawing is called a guideline. It isn't necessarily the end product, but a mark made to help you position things correctly on your page. Guidelines often find their way into the finished piece without the author noticing. This is especially true for people who flail at vague visual ideas like me. However, some people think very carefully about how guidelines will be used in- or removed from- the final image.

Let's start with what they teach you in art schools.

When you're drawing a model, it can be difficult to scale and position what you see on the page. One method they teach to help with this is called sighting. Ever see someone hold their thumb up at a model before drawing? That's sighting. Actually, using your thumb isn't that great. A more accurate method is to use your pencil. Basically, what you're doing, is measuring the proportions of the face in relation to one another. Eye-widths compared to nose height, chin heights to jaw lengths, etc. So long as your proportions are correct in regards to one-another on your page, you can scale it to whatever you want! No rulers necessary! Just a sharp eye.

They also teach you a general understanding of underdrawing, though you'll be lucky to find an instructor who says "guidelines" or "Construction" or, god forbid, "Line of action"!

Basically, they teach you to make educated guesses with your marks, based on the edges of your support. You make light marks, that way anything REALLY outa' wack can be easily erased. As you go, correct marks are gone over repeatedly, and they darken. Moving outward from this process, the dark, shadowy areas begin to darken more and more, and you push outward from your lines until you reach the "pure" white of your page. (This is, of course, purely addative drawing. It works in reverse for subtractive drawing, and both ways from gray in addative/subtractive)

The art schools are actually behind in their understanding of how to draw. By neglecting "lower" media, such as animation, comics and cartooning, they haven't been able to benefit from the discoveries and methods developed therein.

Caricature changed a lot of things, and a lot of artists don't even know it. It is a direct abstraction of a real human form. That is, a caricature has a model. A caricaturist changes the way the face looks, usually for comedic effect. Personally, I try to emphasize properties about their face that I like, for whatever reason. It is from caricature that the cartoon was born.

A cartoon is a complete abstraction, but maintains representation. That is, a cartoon is not based off of a specific model, but derived from experiences, memories, thoughts and ideas in the artist. Cartoons are often very simple, but they reached a new level of interest when animation was applied to them.

Animators had to find a way of drawing the same complex character over and over again, in an infinite number of poses, accurately and consistently. How would they do it? Well, they were already cartoonists, essential masters of simplification! They simplified it even further! A head became a circle, a leg became a swirvy line, a sandwich became a flat square. This is construction.

Animators developed a lot of ways of doing it, and no one way is right, and you're probably better off using them all interchangeably and finding new ways of your own. But let's focus on some basic components:

Line of action. Ever see a character from an animation still-framed? They almost always have a strong presence on the screen, clear and entertaining posing. How does the artist do this? First, the artist knew what he wanted the character to do. Second, he drew a line of action. Just a single pencil mark denoting the general layout of the character on the screen. Then he draw out the construction on top of that, following it closely, emphasizing it with the forms where necessary.

Form layering and hierarchy. A character can be extremely complex, but so long as the artist understands how to assemble it, it can be animated. A character is constructed from many smaller, simpler forms. All of these forms fit into a hierarchy within the character. So the artist begins with the largest, simplest, clearest forms. Then he moves through to the next level, and applies smaller forms to those, adding details. Then he moves on to even smaller details. Each time he goes over the entire image, applying each hierarchy individually, assembling the character together as if it were a building.

Outer space, or "negative" space as most other artists call it, is the space around the subject. Space is ESSENTIAL to clear imagery. Knowing how to arrange components on a flat surface to give clarity to their three dimensional meaning without cluttering it in a manner similar to this sentence... Is hard to do. One must know what the focus points of the image are, and how to draw attention to them specifically, while pushing attention away from the unimportant elements. Colour theory comes into this as well quite often. But of course it would, as the manipulation of space and colour are two massive portions of visual composition.

Construction can be applied to models! If you take the time to examine what you intend to draw, you can let your mind simplify it into it's largest, most general shapes. Maybe even a line of action! With that and sighting, you can solidly lay down a foundation for a drawing very quickly and very clearly, without all of the guesswork and slap-dash mark making art teachers are so fond of.

I always hated how to draw books. I was never able to replicate what they made inside the book, and on the few I could do, I could only ever draw them in that one pose! I didn't understand it.

I still hate these books. They imply that construction is easy, simple, something a child can do. This is wrong. A lot of time must be invested into practicing and experimenting with composition. None of these books ever take the time to sit down and explain construction and composition to the kid who bought it. No context is given. And the kid is left with a book they can't use.

I want to release a more mature version of one of these. A dictionary of construction. Thousands of pages of compositional studies of hundreds of subjects and types, with references to similarities among common groups, and comparisons between different artists' methods. Something an artist could actually USE. Something a young artist could actually benefit from.