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On the "Drawing Grids page:
- why using them makes people
uneasy
your inbox!
As a bonus: my
ebook "Buying
Your First Art
- famous artists who used these
tools
- Leon Battista Alberti and the idea
of pictures being thought of as
A plate from Jean Dubreuil's 17the century
windows
Painters"; here, an "artist's glass" is in use
manual, "Practical Perspective Necessary to All
Supplies and
Setting Up",
usually $3.99,
but FREE for you!
- Alberti's idea of usng windows to draw
Name:
- what's a picture plane?
Email:
- Albrecht Drer 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 da Vinci, Drer, Vermeer 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 practice drawing without these tools, 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 View
In the early 15th century the Florentine artist Bruneschelli
conducted a famous experiment that demonstrated
fundamental rules of perspective drawing; it wasnt long
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before Renaissance artists in Florence and Italy at large
were using perspective to striking effect in their paintings.
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 artists 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.
Alberti's drawing grid, or "veil".
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.
Lets 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 pictures 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 artists
eye. The picture plane, as shown below in my drawing, is like a
pane of glass intercepting these rays.
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 Albertis
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 windows size?
True Grid
This 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 outlines on a sheet of glass, as
Alberti and da Vinci as well had written of: the artists
glass, of which an example is shown at the top of this
page.
Illustration from Drer'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, the "picture plane".
In 1506 the German artist Albrecht Drer immersed himself
in Italian Renaissance art theory and after traveling to Italy,
wrote an extremely influential Treatise of Measurement
that included some now-famous illustrations of perspective
devices.
In this famous illustration we see Drer's drawing grid, also known as "the draughtsman's net".
The gadget that interests us most is Drers
draughtsmans net, based on da Vincis similar device,
itself based on Albertis grid (also sometimes called
Albertis veil). It consisted of a square wooden frame with
a net of black threads forming a grid. The artists viewpoint
was fixed by use of an eyepiece set at a distance twice the
height of the grid. Then the artist looks through the frame
and copies the outlines of what he sees onto a piece of
paper with a similar grid marked on it.
What This Means For You
Today, 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 mans eye) that
landscapers can use to sketch out their ideas.
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, its not
cheating! If guys like Michelangelo 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 the page on the
various grid drawing methods, including 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.
Think you might like to buy a grid? I have several available
in my Art Store for purchase: the "Vincent Van Gogh" grid,
the "Drer" grid, and the French "oeil de vieux" ("old man's
eye") pocket grid.
Go from "Drawing Grids" to "Grid Drawing Methods".
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Comment
Kelly Smith Gallery attendant at Frances Young Tang Teaching
Museum
Interesting. Thank you so much for filling in the gaps. I didn't
know the exact origins of the grid and had not heard of the 'veil'
until i found a copy of Alberti's treatise.
Reply Like
1 December 10, 2013 at 3:36pm
Deborah Mends Prsidente at Deborah Mends Art
I'm so glad it was of interest! I have been rather
fascinated with the whole business of the grid and its
origins, since it proves to be so key to being able to
"see" like an artist. It seems strange to me that such a
useful tool is in fact not used more commonly,
although it shouldn't become a crutch.
Reply Like December 16, 2013 at 1:16am
Mary Anderson Dearing
Washington
Top Commenter Sumner,
Thanks
Reply Like
1 October 16, 2013 at 3:30pm
Deborah Mends Prsidente at Deborah Mends Art
Hi Mary - I added two more pages on drawing grids
last night. One is on methods, which already has a lot
on it, but I will be completing it this weekend. The
other is about Vincent Van Gogh and his use of a
drawing grid to draw. Take a look - and thanks for
your thanks!
Reply Like October 26, 2013 at 12:17am
Copyright 2014 by Deborah Mends, Atelier Mends SAS, howtodrawjourney.com
