How Real is Real: Three-Tone Value Drawing

In the contemporary art world all you hear about is how an art work served as social, political, or cultural criticism. In a children’s drawing class, however, they have only one simple desire, which is to draw the likeness of an object. It amuses the right-brain when the eye is tricked to see a 3-dimensional object “stands” on a 2-dimensional surface. It looks real, they say. But how real is real? After all this is drawing not photography. In the beginning a 3-tone value rendering is sufficient to create the illusion of an object, yes, that looks real.   

Herbert Wang, 11

Max peng, 13

Michael Tu, 10

Melisa Li, 12

Lily Song, 8

1+1=2: Multiple Objects Contour Drawing

In the summer of 1985 I spent five weeks in Italy playing in the Spolteto Music Festival near Rome. On days without concerts I roamed up and down Italy visiting museums and churches to see the great art works which I had just studied in my art history class. At Sistine Chapel in Vatican I was stunned by Michelangelo’s breathtaking mural, the Last Judgment. He painted hundreds of figures on the entire altar wall. But as an artist I know that there is no secret to it. The hundreds of figures was painted on the wall one by one. A picture of complexity is just many single objects put together, simple as that.

Melisa Li, 12

Michael Tu, 10

Herbert Wang, 11

Lily Song,  8

That's me in Rome in 1985. Italy is a country of living art history.

The Form, The Form, The Form: Contour Drawing

When Michelangelo heard someone praising the beautiful colors of Venetian artist Titian’s painting, he dismissed with a haughty air, “the form, the form, the form, that’s what an artist should care about. Color is the business of the paint maker!” I secretly think that Michelangelo was envious of Titian’s marvelous sense of color. But I agree with him on the importance of getting accurate form of objects in observational drawing. This makes contour drawing an indispensable foundation exercise. 

Melisa Li, 12

Lily Song, 8

Max Peng, 13

Herbert Wang, 11

Michael Tu, 10

Seeing Is Believing: Blind Contour Drawing

Have you experienced this phenomenon? You want to draw. You arrange a vase, two apples, and a bunch of banana on the table for a nice still-life drawing. You start to draw, but your eyes are not looking at the vase, the apples and the bananas, instead, your eyes are fixed on the paper. You finish the drawing. It looks so stiff. You didn't get the flowing curve of the vase or the small intricate shape on the head of the bananas. You wonder why. Yes, this is the work of the trickster left-brain. It keeps telling you impatiently, okay, okay, you already know these stuff. So you are drawing what you think you know instead of what you see. In the exercise of blind contour drawing we do not look at the paper. We fix our eye on the object and follow its edges like a small snail crawling. The hand follows the eye instead of the mind, so we are drawing what we see and not what we think we know. And here is the result. 

Lily Song, age 8

Max Peng, age 13

Herbert Wang, age 11

Michael Tu, age 10

Melisa Li, age 12 

In the Beginning

Students drawing a pre-instruction self-portrait
(click on photo for a better view)

We came into the world. We opened our eyes to look and see shapes and colors. Then our mother started talking to us. She pointed at her nose, this triangle, and told us this was called “nose”. Nose, you repeated after her. The sound by itself has no meaning, but when the sound is attached to that triangle on our face it gives the triangle a name, which is a verbal symbol. From there on we remember the name of things and forget the shapes of them.

The little that we know of language is controlled by the left side of our brain and visual perception is the activity of the right side of the brain. In life there are things that need the cooperation of both sides of the brain, such as playing a musical instrument. Reading, writing and mathematics, however, require only the left side of brain, and visual perception only the right side of the brain. From the first day we enter school, reading, writing and mathematics dominate the curriculum. The left side of the brain is constantly stimulated and developed. Not using much of it, the right side of the brain goes into deep slumber.  

Learning to draw is learning to see. We are endowed with this ability. All we need to do is to wake up the right side of the brain from its slumber. The first exercise I assign students is to copy a master’s work upside down. The left side of the brain is debilitated by this exercise when the association of names and shapes is broken, and then drawing is easy. The hand faithfully follows the eye to put down on paper what we see. 

At the first class students copied Picasso's line drawing of Stravinsky upside down 
(click on photo for a better view)