Chapter 2 | OBLIQUE OR STRAIGHT?
Suppose you are drawing a part of your environment. You may have difficulty estimating how oblique or straight a line or plane should be drawn. Artists then also use a trick which I will explain in three exercises:
Exercise 1: Hold your arm out in front of you with the pencil exactly along the line you want to trace. Close one eye and look at the position of your pencil (image). The direction of your pencil determines how slanted you should draw the line on your paper, in the example the sloping roof of a building. Check it out with objects in your environment.
Exercise 2: in the same way you can estimate the position of body parts in relation to each other, such as the head in relation to the feet of someone who’s sitting on the floor. This helps immensely with figure drawing or the position of objects relative to each other. Try it out with people or objects in your environment.
Exercise 3: the trick is above all super useful with (perspective) lines that run away from you in the distance, such as the lines of a street. Make sure your pencil tip is not pointing into the distance. Always hold your pencil parallel to an imaginary sheet of glass between you and the subject. Try it out with perspective lines in your environment. For perspective lines, see the lesson Perspective, level 3, parts 1 and 2.
IT IS ALSO EASY WITH A VIEWFINDER
The ‘lens opening’ of the viewfinder makes it much easier to see in which direction a line is running. This is especially the case with perspective lines like the book at the bottom in the next composition.
Determining the direction of (perspective) lines with a viewfinder