HOW TO DRAW JOURNEY:GRID DRAWING

Copyright 2015 by Deborah Mends - Visual Thinking Lab LLC - www.vizthinklab.com - www.howtodrawjourney.com

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Table of ContentsChapter 1 4About Drawing Grids

Chapter 2 8Leon Battista Alberti and His "Veil”

Chapter 3 10Grid Drawing Methods

Chapter 4 22The Vincent Van Gogh Drawing Grid

About Deborah MendsCopyright

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Introduction 3

Introduction

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One of the biggest obstacles to drawing realistically – for both beginners and even seasoned artists who have not had training in classical methods – is the inability to “see” the special way that permits realistic drawing and painting.

In fact, the key to this “artist sight” is found in treatises written and experiments conducted especially in Renaissance Florence.

With this rediscovery of perspective drawing, these techniques became commonly known and utilized by artists over the centuries, from Leonardo da Vinci to Van Gogh, yet in our own age they have often been forgotten or overlooked.

Finally, with the rising 19th century idea of the artist touched by his muse, drawing came to be thought of as a talent, or secondarily as a skill hard won through long years of study.

Yes, history has given us geniuses like Picasso that take art to a new level. Yet even Picasso himself was taught to draw as a child, by his father. Anyone can learn this skill, just as anyone can learn to read. And one of the simplest tools for doing so is the drawing grid.

This book will give you a thumbnail idea of the history and concepts useful for understanding how to use drawing grids, and then it breaks down, step by step, the various grid drawing methods and types of grids.

Want more on how to draw?

Then take a look at my continually growing website HowToDrawJourney.com, with its free weekly lessons, videos and other material to give your inner artist a treat.

Want to know where to buy grids?

You may also purchase different kinds of drawing grids on the Deborah Mends Art Store page on my website.

Just remember that drawing is within reach, and will give you vision without bounds!

Deborah MendsViz Think LabOffice 907F – twofour54 – Park Rotana BuildingP.O. Box 769381 – Abu Dhabi – UAE

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About Drawing GridsChapter 1

In this chapter:

- why using grids makes people uneasy- famous artists who used these tools- Leon Battista Alberti and the idea of pictures being thoughtof as windows

- Alberti's idea of using windows to draw- what's a picture plane?- Albrecht Dürer and his "draughtsman's net"

Grids make people uneasy. The student, the seasoned artist too, most often looks over her shoulder before starting to stealthily draw the lines on their canvas for a grid. Why? Because it makes it so much faster and easier to draw an image properly that it feels like, well, cheating.

Allow me to set your mind at rest. There is absolutely no doubt that artists of a stature like that of Ver-meer, da Vinci, Dürer and Van Gogh employed drawing grids for their drawings and paintings, and if they could do it, well we can too, especially when you first start to learn how to draw. The important thing is to keep drawing grids in their place; they should be a tool, not a crutch. Don't forget to prac-tice drawing without perspective groups, to develop your eyes’ accuracy.

Let's take a brief look at where the idea of using drawing grids began; it is useful for understanding how they work.

A Room with a ViewIn the early 15th century the Florentine artist Brunelleschi conducted a famous experiment that demonstrated fundamental rules of perspective drawing; it wasn’t long before Renaissance artists in Florence and Italy at large were using perspective with striking effect in their paintings.

A plate from Jean Dubreuil's 17th century manual, "Practical Perspective

Necessary to All Painters"; here, an "artist's glass" is in use

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Then, about twenty years later, artist and art theorist Leon Battista Alberti wrote the first modern treatise on painting, “On Painting”. He took the position that it was the artist’s job to make his picture represent that world as if the person looking at his painting were in a room and looking out a window.

He described a simple method: creating drawing grids across an actual window so the artist could copy the scene framed in the window to a canvas gridded in just the same way.

For practical reasons it is most likely that it was for demonstration purposes only, but the concept is an important one for us: the window corresponds to what is called the “picture plane”.

Let’s look at it another way. In the Renaissance artists liked to describe how perspective works by using the metaphor of the archer and the arrow. Just as an archer closes one eye and looks down the length of his arrow to aim at a determined target, the artist should imagine a line from his eye to the picture’s vanishing point.

Alberti imagined this visual ray and others as the artist looked up and down, which formed a cone of lines radiating from the artist’s eye. The picture plane, as shown below in my drawing, is like a pane of glass intercepting these rays.

Alberti's drawing grid, or "veil"

Want to test it? All you have to do is go to a real window and look at a tree or building through the glass. Shut one eye, and with your finger, you can easily outline the shape on the glass. In so doing, you are drawing on Alberti’s picture plane. But how easy would it be for you to copy that shape, in the right proportions, on a separate piece of paper? And what if you wanted to make your drawing bigger or smaller than that window’s size?

True GridThis is where drawing grids come in.

Renaissance artists developed perspective drawing into a very sophisticated, mathematical art. But by the early 16th century the best way of reproducing a scale image still remained that of tracing the out-lines on a sheet of glass, as Alberti and da Vinci as well had written of: by using the “artist’s glass”, of which an example is shown in the illustration at the beginning of this chapter.

In 1506 the German artist Albrecht Dürer immersed himself in Italian Renaissance art theory and after traveling to Italy, wrote an extremely influential “Treatise of Measurement” that included some now-fa-mous illustrations of perspective devices

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Illustration from Dürer's "Treatise of Measurement" showing the method of producing a scale image by marking the outlines of the object on a sheet of glass - in other words, on

the "picture plane".

In this celebrated illustration we see Dürer's drawing grid, also known as "the draughtsman's net".

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The gadget that interests us most is Dürer’s “draughtsman’s net”, based on da Vinci’s similar device, itself based on Alberti’s grid (also sometimes called “Alberti’s veil”). It consisted of a square wooden frame with a net of black threads forming a grid. The artist’s viewpoint was fixed by use of an eyepiece set at a distance twice the height of the grid. Then the artist looked through the frame and copied the out-lines of what he saw onto a piece of paper with a similar grid marked on it.

What This Means For YouToday, grids are still very much in use. In France even today, while rare, it is still possible to find a pocket grid called an “oeil de vieux” (an “old man’s eye”) that landscapers today use to draw the set-tings of houses and gardens. If you are familiar with Peter Greenaway’s 1982 film, “The Draughtsman’s Contract”, you will have seen a landscape draughtsman at work with a larger form of a grid set on a tripod.

If you want to copy an image, gridding up the original and transferring it to your gridded paper or canvas will be faster, easier and just plain more accurate. No, it’s not cheating! If guys like Michelan-gelo and Raphael can do it, then it's ok for us to do it!

You may want to take a look at my translation of Alberti’s thoughts on the usefulness of grids. It is also interesting to read what Van Gogh had to say about them.

Want to give it a try? Take a look at Chapter 3, which lays out the various grid drawing methods; it also includes a discussion of the problem of aspect ratio - in other words, keeping things from getting distorted as you make your picture bigger or smaller than the original.

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First, it always presents you with the plane, unaltered. There where you have marked precise limits, you will easily find the pyramid's true cuspid (NB: “point”), which would assuredly be difficult without the grid. You are aware of how impossible it is to copy something that does not continually have the same ap-pearance, for it is easier to imitate painting than sculpture. You are aware that as the centre's distance and position of the centre are modified, the thing you see also appears to change greatly. Therefore, as I said, the veil will be quite useful to you, since that which you see is always the same thing.

Second, it will be easy for you to find where the outline and the planes lie. Here on this parallel line you will find the forehead, on that the nose, on another the cheeks, on this lower one the chin and all the outstanding features each in their place. You will be able to put everything in its right place, on walls or panels divided up with similar parallel lines.

Last, the veil will help you greatly in learning to paint when you see round objects and objects in relief through it. It is in this manner that you will be able to use your experience and judgment to see how very useful our veil can be to you.

Also, I will not listen to what some may say, that the painter should not use these things, because even though they are a great help in painting well, perhaps they are such that he will soon be unable to do anything without them.

Leon Battista Alberti and His "Veil”The following extract is from "On Painting", by Leon Battista Alberti, and describes the use of drawing grids for what, as far as we know, was the first time. My translation:

"Here is that which will be of great use to he who desires to use it. I think that there is nothing more useful than this 'veil' which, when I am with my friends, I call a grid.

It is a thin veil (NB: apparently a very fine, transparent piece of cloth) dyed whatever color you like and finely woven, larger threads to indicate as many parallels as you wish. I place this veil between my eye and the thing I see, so that the visual pyramid crosses through the fine veil. This veil can be very useful to you.

Chapter 2

Leon Battista Albert

I do not believe that a painter should be expected to suffer endless pain, but rather to make paintings with good relief and that are a good likenesses of their subject. I do not believe this can ever be done without using the veil. Therefore, let us use this grid, or veil, as we have said. Then, when a paint-er wishes to test his skill without the veil, let him first mark the edges of the objects within the veil's parallel lines, or he may study them differently in imagining a line intersected by its perpendicular wherever these limits fall."

- Leon Battista Alberti

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Grid Drawing MethodsChapter 3

- In this chapter:

- when grids are useful- what is "aspect ratio"- how to use grids of squares to transfer an image to a format that is exactly the same size and aspect ratio- how to use grids of squares to transfer to a different size but the same aspect ratio- how to use European grids to easily grid up, down and sideways, and accommodate aspect ratio changes- how to use grids to draw from life

What is Grid Drawing Good For?You will find a lot of websites and books that will tell you how to use grids to copy a favorite photo or photocopied image onto a piece of paper or canvas that is exactly the same size. In fact, that’s pretty easy to do, and in this regard it is almost just as easy and perhaps even faster, if the situation permits, to simply trace the outlines of what you want to get a quick copy. But we are going to go further than that here.

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Vincent Van Gogh sketched here his plan for using his own grid for drawing, in this letter to his brother Theo dated 5th August 1882.

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For starters, there are cases where grid drawing accomplishes things that simple tracing cannot. I discovered this at age eighteen when my then-new college roommate Kris aspired to our copying Calder’s brilliant painting of a sea-horse head on our bathroom wall (unfortunately, for copyright rea-sons I can't show you his wonderful work here!). Kris did it by “gridding up”, or blowing it up in the same proportions; just as, if we had needed to, we could have copied the mural onto a postcard by “gridding down” (by the way, she and I still laugh today about how she wouldn’t trust me to paint the all-important edges in our project!). So grids make things bigger and smaller.

Then, a couple of decades later, as part of my decorative painting training here in France, I learned something else that you can do: grid drawing transfers an image from one format in one set of pro-portions, to another format in different set of proportions. For example, if you want to paint an image originally in a narrow space onto a wall that is a wide space - well, you can see the results below. There will be some distortion, depending on how different the proportions will be (this is when we get into the subject of "aspect ratio"), but sometimes you have to ignore that and tell yourself that’s what the client wants, right?

Last, grid drawing is great for drawing (and painting) from life and sharpening your ability to see like an artist. Nobody appreciated this more than Vincent Van Gogh, who wrote eagerly to his brother Theo when he discovered grids and how they could move him forward as an artist, telling him all about the heavy wood-and-iron drawing grid he had made up to lug around with him in the field. By the way, there are a couple of little tricks for making this work for you, which I’ll tell you about as well.

So let’s begin!

In my trompe l'oeil painting (left) I used the vertical "portrait" format, ideal for the dining room panel it was intended for; but if I want to make it a horizontal "landscape" format (right) for a rectangular living room panel, there will be distortions - and just like my client, you have to decide whether or not you can live with them or if you just change the image.

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First Off: What's Aspect Ratio?Aspect ratio is, very simply, the ratio for a given proportional relationship between height and width. This is familiar to us from our looking at different film formats or computer or televi-sion screen sizes, such as the 4:3 or the 16:9 screen. Mind, it is not the same thing as the dimensions or the size. You can have big or small 4:3 screens, you can have 4:3 screens that mea-sure 40x30cm or ones that measure 120x90m.

Aspect ratio is expressed as X:Y ("x to y") while dimensions are expressed XxY ("x times y"). Therefore, a square's aspect ratio is always 1:1, while there are an infinity of different dimensions that are all squares: you can have a square that is 2 x 2 inches, or 3 x 3 centimeters, or 895 x 895 miles...you see? You still with me?

In the picture to the left, you'll see a number of different aspect ratios that you come across commonly every time you watch a film or video.

Why am I telling you all this? Because the notion of "aspect ratio" will come in handy in understanding the different things a drawing grid can do for you, as we get into the nitty-gritty. OK, now that definition is clear, let's move on to our step-by-step instructions.

1. Grid Drawing Copying with Squares

Size: SameAspect Ratio: Same

a) You start off with the image you want to copy, be it big or small. You are going to trace a grid pattern over it, so if it is a valuable family photo, for example, you will want to do one of several things to make sure you don't ruin it:

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- put it under a sheet of hard, clear plastic or glass and draw your grid on the sheet, not the photo

- wrap it in plastic wrap and do your grid drawing on the plastic wrap

- slip it in a freezer bag (they come in various sizes) after you cut the zipper lock off and draw your grid on the bag

- if you must do your grid drawing directly on the image, do it very lightly, in pencil, so you can deli-cately erase after; unlike some recommendations out there, I don't suggest using an architect's pencil, which will engrave the lines too deeply on your precious image.

b) Next step. Using a ruler, you are going to mark off dots at regular intervals along each side of the image (or on the surface protecting it). You may have a ruler in inches and want to have your dots an inch apart. Here in France I have mine in centimeters, so I decided to make my dots 2cm apart. Then making sure you keep your ruler perpendicular to the edge of your paper, you rule the lines to create the grid. Note that I'm doing everything in ink rather than pencil, so you can see what I'm up to.

c) Now you take the paper or whatever the surface is you want to transfer the image to, and you mark an identical row of dots, horizontally and vertically. And you connect them up to create a grid drawing with exactly as many boxes, of the same size as on your original image.

e) Set the drawings side by side - it will make it easier for you to see what you're doing.

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f) When you first start working with grids you will find it easier if you make what the French call a "cache". Make a photo-copy of your blank grid, and with a pair of scissors, cut out one square. You can then lay your "cache" on top of the original drawing to isolate just one square at a time. Here I have isolated the square of the extreme lower left of my gridded drawing by laying my "cache" over it.

h) So now, copy exactly what you see in the box, in the corresponding box in the new grid drawing. Here I have simply laid pieces of paper to isolate the one I'm copying in the lower left. The top of the upside-down triangle starts halfway across the top of the square, so I'll angle it down from the same place in the new box.

i) And by continuing the same way, simply carefully copying box by box, I'll finish by completing a copy of the first grid drawing. I've done mine in ink, but if you have done yours with light pencil, you should be able to carefully erase the lines of your grid from your final grid drawing. Voilà!

g) This means I have broken the daunting task of copying the drawing down into that of just copying one simple square - the one in the lower left

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2. Grid Drawing Enlargement with SquaresSize: DifferentAspect Ratio: Same

a) We start again with the same drawing. This time, though, we want to make it bigger. Let's say twice as big

b) In the same manner we are going to draw a grid on the image we want to copy, or on whatever is protecting it, here marking out lines and creating boxes 2cm square.

c) However, this time when we mark out the dots to make our grid that we will be copying the image into, we're going to put 4cm instead of 2cm between the dots. Therefore, I will have boxes twice as big as in the original

d) I work exactly the same way, covering up the rest of the grid to concentrate on one square at a time, copying the small box into the corresponding large box.

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e) When I finish I'll have a grid drawing that's identical, but this time exactly twice as big as the original.

If I want my image to be smaller than the original, I need only make the squares in the second grid smaller - instead of an inch, half an inch wide; instead of two centimeters, only one centimeter wide.

a) You start with your original image, protecting it if you need to

3. Grid Drawing the Van Gogh WaySize: DifferentAspect Ratio: Same

Now for fun, I'm going to teach you about a different way of doing grids, one that corresponds more to how Vincent Van Gogh worked and the grid he used in the illustration at the beginning ofChapter 4.

Most drawing manuals and websites out there talk about the square-by-square method we just have covered. I learned a different method first from the tempestuous old Spanish master artist who taught me decorative painting technique; it takes a little while to get the hang of it - dealing with triangles and rectangles at the same time instead of just simple squares can get confusing - but it can be useful on detail. I subsequently found this is the method used by many master artists, at least in France.

b) You draw two diagonals from corner to corner of your image. If your image is not a perfect square or rectangle, or even if it is a shape like a circle, draw a square or rectangle around it to make your diagonals.

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c) Now you draw vertical and horizontal lines dividing the image in quarters, so that everything intersects in the middle. Are you starting to see the resemblance to Vincent Van Gogh’s grid in Chapter 4?

d) Do the same thing to create your second grid that you will transfer into. Here I have decided I want a new aspect ratio, with my final drawing to be a little wider and not quite as high, to fit it neatly into the place I have in mind for it in a book.

e) You may already have segmented enough to be able to get to work copying the drawing. This time, if you want to use a "cache", you will make it triangular. But I see that part of the drawing I am copying has more detail than in other parts. I'd like to develop the segmenting so I can really get those details accurate.

f) So I do the same routine in that smaller rectangle in just that part of the drawing - diagonals, vertical, horizontal - to create 8 new smaller triangles within that rectangle, along with 4 new smaller rectangles. It will be easier to get my details accurate in the copy, because I will be dealing with smaller pieces of the drawing. If I want even more detail, I just choose one of the smaller rectangles and do it yet again.

g) And here is my drawing in a slightly different aspect ratio.

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Nevertheless, the further you push the aspect ratio difference, the further the distortion goes, such as when you are trying to make a "portrait" format go "landscape" or vice versa. In that case, you have to crop off part of the original image to get it closer to the aspect ratio of the final format you want, to limit the distortion.

There is nevertheless a use for distortion taken this far: the interesting world of anamorphousdrawing!

What’s that? It’s those clever trompe l’oeil drawings that, if you stand at just the right angle, make a strange blurry mess start to take form and look startlingly real. You can sometimes see chalk artists drawing these on the streets of the world’s big cities, but the most famous example in the history of art is in Holbein’s painting “The Ambassadors”. Strangely enough, a few centuries went by before people realized that the odd smear angling across the bottom of the painting was, if you looked at it from the right angle, a skull (and therefore a warning about vanity…but that’s another story).

Note the strange blurry mass angling from the lower left up to the right in Holbein’s painting shown in its entirety, left; if you stand to the left of the actual painting and look at the blurry mass, moving back and forth to position yourself

correctly, the play on the perspective will cause you to realize you are in fact looking at a human skull, a reminder that all wealth and power is mere vanity, passing with death

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4. Grid Drawing Copying with DiagonalsSize: DifferentAspect Ratio: Same

a) With this next method, you are trying to enlarge or reduce an image while keeping the same aspect ratio.

Position your image in the upper left corner of the paper you are copying onto, with the image's diagonal aligned with the paper's diagonal, as in the picture to the left.

b) Your job is to draw that diagonal from one corner to the other of your paper...

...in such a manner that it would also cut across the diagonal of the image. Mark where you want your copy to extend to on the paper

c) Now drop a vertical down from where you marked the paper at the size you want. Where it intersects the diagonal, draw a horizontal.

d) Divide your new rectangle up into the same number of squares as in the original, and you're good to go..

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5. Grid Drawing From LifeWe're looking at the drawing of Alberti’s drawing grid again (right) so that we can talk about using drawing grids to draw from life.

Whether the grid is a design of squares as in Alberti's version, or whether in the design of rectangles and triangles as in Van Gogh's version at the top of this page, we are still talking about the same process described on this page.

The one thing that is different is that the position of your eye will matter.

Why?

That's because we have binocular vision - two eyeballs working together, in other words. If you want to see what I mean, then hold up your finger and close an eye to look at it. Now close that eye and look from the other one. See how it jumps from one side to the other? That is just what we don't want to happen when you are trying to capture something on paper by looking through a drawing grid.

Hence the importance of that little thing the big red arrow is pointing at: the viewfinder. You need to ensure that when you look through the grid that your head and especially your eye is always in the same position - otherwise, your drawing will go pear-shaped, literally.

The old masters used a little pointy thing as in Durer's illustration below that we already saw in the introduction to this subject. There is a little trick I use that not only avoids the problem of keeping the eye in one position, as a bonus it avoids the risk of harm from having something so sharp at your face.

When you are ready to draw your subject, sight it through your grid.

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When you look through your grid, position it so that you can find some convenient place where a grid intersection falls on an easy-to-recognize and very precise point on the subject.

You’ll see in the example below of an Abu Dhabi landscape that I chose a building corner.

Every time you look at your subject through the grid, you're going to always close the same eye, and re-align that same intersection and same point on your subject; just as I always realigned that same intersection with that same building corner.

Now you go to work, just as you did on paper, except this will be Real Life. What you see in the square in front of you, you copy into the square on your paper or canvas.

You will find that Vincent Van Gogh was right - compared to getting it right by just looking at your subject, especially when your eye is not used to artist sighting, you will get the outlines down "like light-ning", as he said! Check out my translation of his letter on the subject to his brother Theo, in the next chapter..

The Vincent Van Gogh Drawing GridChapter 4

In this chapter:

- a brief introduction to Van Gogh's use of the grid

- my translation of his letter to Theo on the subject

Van Gogh's drawing method was one that developed out of trial and error. Essentially self-taught, for Van Gogh one of the major turning points in his development was when he discovered at about age 29 what some translators call a "perspective frame", or what could be more clearly called a "drawing grid".

The Vincent Van Gogh drawing grid consists of three wires stretched across a frame to intersect in the middle, as shown in the little sketch above that Van Gogh put in a letter to his brother Theo to show how he planned to use it on dunes.

On 5th or 6th August 1882, at Le Hague, he triumphantly wrote again with more details on the grid he was using so successively. In fact this manner of working went on to become an important step in his work as a painter, in that today the grid lines can be discerned on the works either with the naked eye or a microscope, or can be detected with infrared photography. The Vincent Van Gogh drawing method served admirably to take him on to painting. My translation:

"Theo,

You will have seen in my last letter the drawing grid that I told you about. I’ve just got back from the blacksmith’s, who made iron tips to go on the stakes and corners for the grid itself.

It has two long stakes, and you can attach the grid either vertically or horizontally with solid wooden pegs.

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The Vincent Van Gogh drawing grid as he drew it in his letter to Theo, 5th or 6th August 1882

So when you are at waterside or in a field or in the meadows you can look through it as through a window; the vertical lines and the perpendiculars of the grid as well as the diagonals and where they intersect, as well as the divisions into sections, all give fundamental reference points. With their help you can make a solid drawing, from getting the indication of the main lines and proportions – at least if you have some sense of perspective and comprehension of why and how perspective makes the lines appear to change direction and changes the apparent size of things in relation to the whole. Without this the device is of little or no help, and it befuddles you to look through it. I think you can imagine how small a job and how easy it is to set it for viewing the sea, or grassy fields, or snowy meadows in winter for the wonderful web of thin or thick tree branches and trunks in autumn, or stormy skies.

In fact, for painting it is just the thing. To capture earth, sea and sky you need a brush, or I mean that to capture all that in a drawing you need to know and understand how a brush works. I really think that if I paint for a while it will have a great deal of influence on my drawing. I already tried painting in January, but then I had no choice but to stop. I decided to because, among other things, I was not confident enough about my drawing skills. Now I have spent six months very much on drawing, so I am turning to painting again with renewed courage. The drawing grid is really a fine piece of work-manship; it’s a shame you didn’t see it before you had to go. It was fairly expensive, but it’s been made solidly, to last quite a while. So next Monday I’m starting on big charcoal studies, and on paint-ing small studies. If I can manage those two things, then I hope to have better paintings soon. I want my space to be a real painting studio by the time you’re here again. Things came to a halt in January, as you are aware, for a number of reasons, but in the end you can consider it like a little thing that needed fixing on a machine, like a weak screw or post that just needed replacing by one that could handle more.

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I bought a nice warm, solid pair of trousers and a pair of stout shoes just before you came, so I am ready for rain and storm. I have made up my mind that painting landscapes will teach me one or two things about technique that I think I need for figure drawing, especially how to capture different textures, color and tone. In short, the mass, or the body of things. Your visit has made this possible, but before you were here I thought about this every day and I would have had to stick to just whites and blacks and outlining. But now my ship has set sail.

Goodbye, brother, with one more warm handclasp for you.

Best,Vincent"

Where to Buy Drawing Grids and Going Further

A drawing grid is a valuable tool to get you started on your journey to learn how to draw. To purchase the Van Gogh Grid, the Classic Squares Grid or the French “Oeil de Vieux” Pocket Grid, visit my online store at http://www.howtodrawjourney.com/deborah-mends-art-store.html .

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I'm Deborah Mends, an artist and visual thinking consultant, and the founder of Viz Think Lab which offers graphic recording and graphic facilitation services; we also offer visual thinking training and especially the “Artist Sight” course, an innovative artistic drawing training based on neuroscience that gets students drawing realistically in as little as five days.

After working many years in communication and marketing in Tokyo, New York and Paris, I began by earning French State certification to paint faux marble, faux wood and trompe l'oeil. I worked for a time in London and Paris for private clients and interior designers. One day I was asked to design how to paint the walls of a church crypt to illustrate an ancient Biblical text. That project was a turning-point for me; I started wondering if I could improve my drawing skills to do more creative projects.

What followed was years of training as intensive as my earning a living and raising two kids permitted. I was lucky enough to take classes in Paris at top schools for classical art training, like Boulle and Duperré. Then, I spent three full-time years studying perspective, life drawing, anatomy, composition, drawing and painting at the Ateliers de Beaux-Arts de Paris, each year completed by presentation of my portfolio to a jury to get into the next year. I also did a lot of “atelier” time with several different master artists, a peculiarly European learning method. This means that after presenting my portfolio, the master artists accepted my working independently under them in their own studios. I gravitated to master artists specialized in early painting and drawing techniques, a relatively small circle in Paris.

The French learning system is not made for the faint of heart. I learned about humility and compassion the hard way. As a teacher, it means today I know the primordial importance of patience and caring in bringing out the qualities that lie in us all. Culture vulture, lover of academic research and freelance translator for major art museums in France and abroad, I not only burn to teach others how to draw, but also to share information on famous artists and their work.

It's a scientific fact that everyone is creative, and I believe that the easiest and fastest route to opening it up is through drawing - because it's a skill that anyone can learn, just like anyone can learn to read.

Today, I offer drawing instruction in France and the UAE. Combining fifteen years of classical art techniques learned directly from masters in France with what we now know about how the mind learns, I can guarantee that my live instruction method will work to get you drawing realistically - and within a week of instruction - even if you are persuaded that you are not creative at all. The same course is also available stretched out over a 5-week or 10-week period.

About Deborah Mends

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Visit my website for further information on drawing and drawing resources, as well as free weekly drawing lessons. You can also contact me there directly to ask me

any questions you may have or send me your work for feedback.

Your journey has only just begun, but you'll go far!

Please visit our website (www.howtodrawjourney.com),our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/vizthinklab.com),

or follow us on Twitter (@vizthinklab)

Copyright

Published by: Deborah Mends, Visual Thinking Lab LLC (“Viz Think Lab”) Copyright © 2015 by Deborah Mends; All Rights Reserved.

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