I did a post a few days ago about perfectionism. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then, both in terms of this site and in terms of my drawing.

very, very bad drawing of a wolf

The first one was the first wolf I drew when I started drawing for the new “how to draw a wolf” tutorial I just put up on the site. I had not drawn a wolf in a long time, maybe never, and this is what my first attempt looked like.

Not pretty. Pretty awful, in fact. So I took the proverbial deep breath and tried to do a little better by breaking the image down. The next drawing looked like this:

Not really better, but it was just a study anyways. And even as a study it looked better than the first drawing of a wolf.

That first try almost made me run to the refrigerator for solace while I considered finding a nice day job.

And then I drew this:

Wow! Okay, I lot of you, maybe most of you reading this could draw a better wolf. Heck, after a few more days of practice I can draw a better wolf now. But the difference between the first and third wolf was so huge that it continues to puzzle me. I guess I’m almost puzzled to realize that I really can still draw, because I sort of thought that it was beyond me, that whatever I did when I was younger was some kind of golden opportunity now past. Or I at least thought that I was going to have to work really hard, and draw a lot of wolf #1s before I picked up the skill again.

But I picked it right up. I just had to do three drawings to get there.

Its weird to have a website about drawing this long and stumble across this belief that I really cant draw. That is what has kept me posting public domain material for so long. Of course, it takes a crazy long time to do each drawing tutorial, but I like the results so much I am willing to settle down into just making two or three pages a day.

Besides, who knows how much better I can get if I just practice a bit more?

Many people think of the pencil as the one and only drawing tool. The poor eraser gets pushed aside as something that only gets used after you’ve made a mistake. But that’s a wrong approach to take – your eraser can do a lot more than just cover up the bad lines of your drawing. In special conditions, it can actually become even more useful than your pencil.

So take that eraser out of your pocket and start using it. Here are the three best eraser drawing techniques.

1) For highlighting

If you plan your drawings very, very carefully, you can leave small sections of the paper blank in order to show highlights. This is nearly impossible to do without doing several practice drawings of your subject beforehand, but as you gain more confidence in your drawing skills, you will begin to be able to leave blank sections. Until then, your eraser is an excellent tool for creating highlights.

2) For blending

This works best if your eraser has a dull edge, but even an eraser with a sharp edge can be a great blending tool. Ever noticed that erasers don’t typically create a hard line when they take away pencil lead? Used judiciously, that smudging can work in your favor.

Depending on what kind of eraser you have, the pencil lead you’ve been drawing in and the kind of paper you have, you eraser’s blending ability will change. You can control it by how hard you press down when you make the dabbing motion used to erase.

You can also get interesting effects by the movements you make as you erase – I once got a beautiful texture for a bird’s wing by making light, feather shaped strokes with my eraser. It was the perfect way to create a feeling of motion, while still preserving a lot of the details of the feathers themselves that I had drawn (too bad I lost the drawing!). So try out using erasers to blend shadows, and to blend textures as well.

You can also use your eraser like it was a brush. Rub your pencil on some scrap paper to “load” the paper with lead (kind of like you would load a brush before you paint), and then rub your eraser into the lead “pool”. You now have an interesting tool for blending and making marks that your pencil could never make.

You can also use this “lead pool” trick by rubbing your finger in the lead. This will give you wide, soft strokes. An eraser will typically give you thinner, more accurate strokes than your finger will. Just be careful to keep loading the eraser with lead, or you’ll go from blending to erasing when you don’t want to.

3) For negative space drawings (aka eraser drawings)

If you make a large square and lightly fill it with an even shade (or an uneven shade, if you want to get more complex), you will have a black background. This is when it becomes possible to draw with an eraser. These sorts of drawings are also called “negative space” drawings, and they are typically what people are talking about when they refer to an “eraser drawing”.

Silhouettes are nice as negative space drawings. So are nudes – you can create an almost draping quality to the light and the shadows that is very reminiscent of the draping cloth used to cover certain parts of human models.

What you do for the background can be interesting, too. The classic thing to do is to have it be a flat black background, but nobody will stop you if you decide to try out a background of crosshatches or any other pattern.

How to sharpen an eraser

One of the biggest problems of working with an eraser is how soft they are. It is a very different feel than working with a pencil. If you press down too hard with an eraser, or if you make your stroke in the wrong direction, it is quite easy to break the eraser in half.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way around this. You just cut the eraser so it has a good edge to work with. You can do this with a knife, but even a sharp pair of scissors will work. Just make sure the eraser is flat on a surface before you start cutting, otherwise you might get to add some red to your black and white drawing.

All this cutting is going to mean that you go through your erasers faster than before, but you did buy the erasers to use them, right? If you really like the technique and find yourself doing a lot of eraser work, just look into buying a whole box of erasers at a time. They are much cheaper when you buy them in packs.

There is one other way to use an eraser, and it might give you a bit more control. You basically stencil with your eraser. In other words, find a thin, sturdy edge that you can put on your drawing paper (like a stiff business card, or anything laminated). You can use that edge to create a nice sharp edge between what’s been erased and what has not been erased.

I was talking to some other people who draw last week (none of us really likes the term “artist”) and we uncovered a funny secret stigma about erasers. A few of these folks thought that just having an eraser around when you were sketching meant you weren’t very good at it – because if you needed an eraser around then you must be making a lot of mistakes.

Guys – gals – we gotta talk.

There are two issues here. The first is the perfectionism. The second is that actually the eraser is an excellent drawing tool. For this post I’ll just stick with the perfectionism issue.

Perfectionism kills creativity. Unfortunately, even after wearing my special magic imperfection ring for over a year (to remind me to deliberately mess up sometimes, just to push against the yearning to be perfect), I still struggle with perfectionism. If you have major issues with procrastination, look to see how much perfectionism is interlaced with it. You may find that the secret to actually getting down to work is to decide that you are now going to draw a rotten drawing, or paint a rotten painting. You have to do this seriously, with gusto – it is most fun if you are determined to make something truly awful. Then, ten seconds later, you are actually working. Just don’t stop long enough to realize it.

Perfectionism and drawing are especially odd, because one of the most classic and used techniques for drawing – sketching – is pretty much about making a mess. No sketch is ever supposed to come out perfect. And, oddly enough, it is exactly this imperfection that makes most sketches so appealing.

So why, then, with all this evidence that imperfection is good, do I still have that cranky woman in the back of my head that tells me my drawings have to be perfect?

I don’t know. I guess its a love of excellence gone awry.

I wish I could banish this demand for perfection from myself and from everyone else who wants to draw. It really hurts us. It is the essence of “you’re not good enough” and that evil little thought makes too many of us much less likely to even try to draw.

But here’s another truth about imperfection. Most professional artists (though they may love perfection) are not afraid of making a mess. Of screwing up. Of doing an AWFUL drawing that deserves to be peed on by the cat. They just slog through. Have you ever studied Monet closely? He did dozens and dozens of paintings of the same subject. How many of us amateur artists has done a dozen drawings of the same subject? If we did summon the focus and will to do those dozen drawings, the odds are very, very high that we’d get our precious perfect drawing.

So we can have our perfect drawings. We just need to do the first eleven rotten drawings to get to our prize. Maybe this is the difference between the “good” and “bad” artists – good artists just plow through the awful drawings. They just keep sketching or painting or sculpting until the materials finally give in and – voila – perfection.

I’m not sure if this is patience, or focus, or determination. Its probably a mix of all three.

As you start pushing back against your perfectionism (and drawing those ugly, awful drawings that you are going to give to the cat to pee on), remember writers. Writers, even Shakespeare, do drafts of their work. Most of them do A LOT of drafts of their writing pieces, kind of like Monet’s dozen paintings. Maybe we should just see each awful drawing as a draft.

Also, by the way, even the awful drawings often have one little line that is very good. Find that one little line, celebrate, and then move on.

Being able to create effects of light and shadow is tremendously important in drawing. Even if you never attempt to draw and shade folds of fabric (which is a challenge, trust me), you still need to be able to make simple effects that will suggest light and shade to a normal viewer. This takes practice.

There is a classic exercise for shading that will give you some excellent practice. It is so simple that many people dismiss it, and never actually do it, but if you become one of the students who does actually start and complete this exercise, you will have improved your shading skills dramatically. Do the exercise more than once and you will reap further benefits. Do it a third time and… I’ll let you guess what happens.

The exercise is to get a plain sketchbook, a simple drawing pencil (any #2 pencil will do) and an egg. If you do not have an egg, a large smooth stone like a river stone will do. Even a ball with a smooth surface will work. Having a good eraser (like a kneadable eraser) is helpful, but not necessary.

You sit down and begin drawing your egg, but you may not make any lines. You are forming this image of the egg purely with shading. You will probably have a few false starts, but don’t worry about that. Just crumple up your mistakes and start again.

As you really settle into doing this, you will immediately realize it is much harder than it sounds. Here are some hints. First, you can use the side of your pencil to create a wider, softer “line” or mark with your pencil than the tip will make. You can also use the tip of your pencil to create extremely light lines that blend together to make the shadows of your egg. You can even make your shadows using “cross hatches” which is when you make a series of light parallel lines in one direction, then make another set of lines over the first set, but at a 90 degree angle. The overlapping sets of lines create the effect of a very light woven pattern.

When you are really good, you will be able to show the little bumps and pock marks in the egg with your shadows. Most people just ignore these little imperfections the first time they do this exercise.

It is not easy to frame your own watercolors. For one thing, unless you are an expert carpenter, you not only have the labor of cutting the molding, but you have to cut the glass and the mount as well. Instead, it is better to go to a competent frame maker. If he is a good one he will know just what moulding and mount to suggest, but if you are doubtful of his judgment, these are the points to remember:

1. The moulding must be neat and simple. Any fancy carving will detract from your picture. The moulding should be natural wood, or, if colored, neutral in tone. If the coloring becomes dirty, it should clean off easily if the moulding has been well treated. Fancy moulding is difficult to keep clean.

2. The mount should be off-white, or colored only if it does not clash with your watercolor. A bold gouache or tempera may be enhanced by a colored mount, but not a delicate watercolor. Unprimed, unbleached canvas makes a good neutral surround to a watercolor, but the frame maker must be skilled at fixing it on to the mount. A badly mounted canvas surround will ruin your picture. The mount should be generous in proportion. A thin mount looks mean and won’t show off the picture to its best advantage.

It used to be fashionable to put lines round the mount, making a frame within a frame. But this I find fussy and distracting and entirely unnecessary.

FRAMING OILS

Again, unless you are a good carpenter, it is better to go to a good frame maker for your frames. And, like water color frames, they should be simple. A highly decorated frame is often expensive and hard to keep clean. A simply designed frame will suit nearly all types of paintings, whereas only a few can stand up to masses of curls and squiggles. They are heavy to handle and difficult to hang. Unless you have the good fortune to live in a mansion, they will look out of place in a modern house.

Gold in small proportions enhances an oil painting but it must be gold leaf which is expensive. Other kinds of gold paint or leaf tend to tarnish and look shoddy after a while. So if you cannot afford pure gold leaf, it is better to leave the substitutes alone entirely and have them colored in a simple neutral tone to go with the scheme of your painting.

No painting, whether large or small, looks well in a mean frame. Have a generously proportioned frame. If you have painted on canvas, instead of a frame a strip of wood neatly tacked round flush with the surface will stop the painting from looking raw. However this method won’t work with board. Board should go into a proper frame.

Framing a watercolor will obviously be different from framing an oil. For instance, it is usual to put drawings and watercolors under glass for protection. An oil can be left exposed, so long as it is given a coat of varnish. This does not keep off all the dust from obscuring the painting, but will protect the painting from harm.

It is, therefore, a good idea to clean the surface of an oil painting from time to time with a mild solution of soapy water that is gently wiped over the surface of the painting and gently dried off. If the painting is thoroughly dry before final varnishing (that is at least six to nine months after completion), any wiping of the surface will do no harm. I have even used detergent on a varnished painting with no ill effects.

Before framing drawings, they should be thoroughly fixed, and if the drawing has not been trimmed, the area to be framed must be clearly. marked. The sort of drawings that frame up well will be the bold and vigorous ones. It is a good idea to put up all your drawings on a wall at one end of the room, then stand well back and see which drawings read across the room. This could be done with your watercolors as well.

It is a good thing to have a little private unframed exhibition of your work every so often. It is interesting to see all your works together and you can plot your progress and development. At first it is unlikely that you will want to frame the lot, but you are sure to find one or two works that will warrant it. Then do so. There are always those favorites that you would like to preserve out of a period of three or six months’ work.

If you have stained your canvas with a tint derived from your color scheme, you will see that unlike painting directly on to a white surface, the colors you start with don’t seem so out of place. They sit nicely on the canvas. On a white surface they would stand out sharply and only settle back after you had covered the canvas completely. This is another advantage of staining your canvas with an underpainting. It allows you to judge your color better.

Whatever you do, it is a good idea to paint in the largest shapes first and then the lesser shapes, finally finishing off with all the smaller stuff, detail and so on. You can try to paint up all the detail from the word go, but it is not recommended. The difficulties in controlling and shaping your picture are intensified if you do.

If you paint up one part too thoroughly and find that when you have finished coloring your canvas it doesn’t fit with the other parts, you have to go through all the business of scraping it out and repainting it. The best approach is to paint up each part, but only up to a point, leaving the final surface details until the very last when you are sure that everything is working together.

With your color schemes and cartoon drawings always by your side, you need have no fear in letting yourself go so that in turn the picture will let itself go as well. There comes a point in any painting when, however carefully you have worked out what you want to do, the painting wants to take over itself. Let it. From this point onwards all the surprises and excitements start happening. Should the picture run away with itself and get out of hand, you can always go back to the original idea contained in the cartoon.

SUMMING UP

You will see from all this that you will have to be more patient in the initial stages than with other forms of painting and drawing. If you take care with all the stages of building up your picture you will not only gain valuable knowledge about painting, and get into good workmanlike habits, but you will be more assured of a successful result.

Composition is not easy to get into, but once you have acquired a little experience, you will find that the enjoyment you derive will be much greater than any other form of improvised painting. Possibly for the first time, you will be really in control of what you are doing. Perhaps this is the reason why so many artists have elected to work away from nature. Because then they can be truly creative, like nature.

When painting up the picture on to the canvas, you may find it useful to have all your drawings ready to hand to refer to. You may also wish to have a color scheme to work from. You will get a better result if you have some idea what colors you are going to use, rather than if you muddle on with only a vague idea of what you are going to do.

The notion that inspiration will descend on you once you hold a brush in your hand is better replaced by the more practical one of knowing a little about what you are going to do. If you have spent so much care in arranging your picture, you may as well spend just that little bit longer and do a color scheme as well.

A simple scheme of color, one that can be added to later without any disastrous effects, is one that relies on two colors and white at the most. Or, if you have a natural way with colors and feel more adventurous, keep your colors in families: browns, reds and ochres; or blues, greens and lemon; or browns and yellows, with just a touch of red. You can even work out a scheme with greys and black, adding just a touch of pure blue or red. Whatever you decide to do, remember to keep it simple, keep it fresh and have some idea what you are going to do.

ON THE CANVAS

To paint directly on to a white canvas can be disconcerting, although if it can be managed without a great deal of overpainting the result can look fresh and charming. But with oil the most exciting qualities lie in its ability to cover well and to be used thickly and juicily. So that it is sometimes more useful to stain your canvas with a light wash of umber, or any other fairly quiet color you like, and stain it over your drawing. For convenience, have a number of canvases ready stained and draw on top of the stain. However, if you stain over your drawing you can select a tone or tint that will be in keeping with your color scheme and this will aid you when you start painting.

When your stain is dry, you can then start. You will find that however lost you may get when painting, if you have done your rough composition and your color scheme, you will always be able to refer back to them. You may want to enlarge and alter your original idea. This often happens. It is a good thing it does. It means the painting is growing.

Some painters find squaring up their final drawings or cartoons irksome and feel that they would like to go straight on to painting up their final design. I hold no firm ideas about this. If you are confident and have the skill, you might manage to do this without any muddle. But for those who prefer to tread more cautiously, squaring up is the next step.

Squaring up a cartoon is merely a convenient way of enlarging your composition on to a canvas. Provided the proportion of your cartoon is the same as that of your canvas, by covering both with the same number of squares you will be able to transfer the cartoon on to the larger scale on your canvas. To square up simply and quickly it is advisable to have your cartoon measured off in inches, so that if it is say 15 in. x 12 in., it will enlarge up to a canvas size of 30 in. x 24 in. and you will only have to measure off 1 in. or 2 in. squares on the cartoon to be in proportion to 2 in. or 4 in. squares on the canvas.

Another method is to divide your cartoon and canvas into halves, quarters and eighths (Fig. 40). This method, however, does not give you squares to guide you but rectangles and rectangles are not so accurate when it comes to helping you to judge the drawing you are putting on to the canvas. This last method is better if you have an odd shaped composition or canvas. You can’t do your cartoons accurately in inches every time.

When you have squared up both your cartoon and canvas, carefully copy what is in the squares of your cartoon on to the equivalent squares on your canvas. Numbering the squares by the edges will eliminate error (Fig. 41).

You can draw up your canvas in charcoal, making sure you blow off any excess dust or it will get into your first coats of paint and mess them up. Or you can use lead pencil, or thinned out umber oil paint and paint in your drawing with a brush. It isn’t necessary to do any more than outline your composition. Any detail will only get lost with the first few coats of paint. Neither is it essential to use tone to state the masses and light and dark. But this last rule is flexible and need not be adhered to if the situation does not warrant it.

If you have the drawings, lay them about you, think about them, choose a central theme and, on a separate sheet of paper, draw out some rectangles, say about 4 in. X 2 in., and fill them with different arrangements. Play about with these arrangements, try this combination and then that. Don’t be afraid to make a mess. Try to make a rough but effective looking design. Use different media. Wash over pencil, color over carbon, and so on. Do as many as you can. Do not overwork them at this stage, keep them rough and free.

When you have settled on a satisfactory composition, you can then start working it up on a slightly larger scale ready for the canvas. Use a shape that you can either cut easily out of hardboard or which is one of the standard canvas sizes. Remember the composition you settle on must grow, not be tailored to fit the wrong shaped canvas. If you start with a horizontal shape, you must finish on a horizontal shape. Once you have begun don’t alter your canvas shape at all. It is much better to start all over again with more rough doodles if you do.

When you have settled the size of your canvas, start to draw up the drawing to a more finished state, ready for transferring to the canvas. It is a good idea to use plenty of tracing paper. When you are trying to sort out your little roughs into something clearer, and are referring back to your details, you may find that by over tracing you will be able to change and alter the design within your rectangle with greater ease and fluidity.

You can push odd items about without the burden of re-drawing all of it. Detail paper is good for this (it is also good for roughing out ideas). You can trace off as many arrangements as you like this way and preserve different parts of the drawing without destroying the whole.

If you have a drawing that is nearly right, or even two drawings you would like to amalgamate, tracing paper can be very useful. Never try to change your original drawing. This is precious. It is all you have to refer to. Trace it off and fiddle about with it that way. It will be easy to see one drawing over another, using tracing paper.

Bear in mind the strong masses and movements when you are doing your small roughs. Avoid timid shapes and movements. Be positive, so that what you have to say is clear. The bolder your design at this stage the better. Think also in terms of what colors you are going to use. But don’t use too many of them. The simpler the scheme of color the better. You could, in fact, do the design in just two colors, adding a third at a later stage or reserving a further color for when you are actually working on the canvas.

Simplicity is the aim. You can add and complicate later.

When you have settled on your composition and have it clearly drawn out, then it is time to transfer it on to the canvas. The final drawing is usually called a cartoon.