Fabric and Action

 

Have you looked at the drawings of the great masters of the past as well as amazing contemporary artists and felt like they all had some secret understanding that, despite all your art classes and hours of smudgy charcoal, no one had ever told you?


You're right, they did all have an intrinsic idea behind their work which I am now going to reveal to you, before you've even started class, and you can all thank me later.

In the seminal book 'The Natural Way to Draw,' the great teacher Kimon Nicolaides says it this way:

We don't draw what something looks like; we draw what it is doing.


We draw the action, the forces and gestures of things. Gravity pulling down, energy thrusting up, action twisting and turning.

We draw the verb and not the noun.

An excellent subject to apply this is fabric, an active fluid material that shows the effects of force and action even in repose.

Every single designer needs to understand the qualities of fabric, what it does and why, and costume designers become complete experts on every seam and weave and thread. In the kit of symbols we learn to draw with, however, we don't really have workable marks for drawing fabric

We must always draw fabric by drawing the pull of gravity, what keeps the cloth from falling to the ground, and how does it twist and fold around forms. The dress, for example, that hangs from the shoulders and gathers across the chest and cascades down the back - it really helps to think in terms of active verbs that give life and energy to the forms of fabric. The dress is not just There - so much is happening!


Think of verbs that can describe fabric; here's 15 off the top of my head:


Fall
Cascade
Drape
Spiral
Flow
Buckle
Stretch
Burst
Tear
Gather
Bunch
Pucker
Pinch
Drop
Twist

Can you add any?

George Bridgman, teaching at the Art Student's League a hundred years ago, broke down the different effects of fabric into the following five categories:






Now, even if fabric often acts like it never read any of Bridgman's books, these are a really helpful guide, and repay study.





Your Mission

Take a piece of fabric, drape it over a chair, and draw it in pencil. Simple as that!

It may be a dress, a sheet, a towel, 2 yards of China silk - it's up to you. It should be a solid color without any pattern, and it probably should be a lighter tone for simplicity's sake. Convey the sense of the fabric's fall to the ground being impeded by the hard form of the chair. Use shading simply and clearly. Use line weight to make the overall form clear, and don't let the lines of folds and wrinkles overwhelm the drawing - big forms first, details within.

And show me that rather than just doing an exercise, you are opening yourself to the miracle of actuality before your very eyes, the joy of perception! As Blake said, all movements and all sights contain the seed of ecstasy!






Fabric Study, Leonardo Da Vinci
Ox Gall ink wash on prepared paper,
heightened with lead white
circa 1470, Louvre