* <<J0O3FM06>> Drawing notes (H3O)
Created: 3/24/2017, 10:21:13 AM

<http://alph.laemeur.com/img/H3O>

I need considerable improvement in my treatment of scenery. Urban or
rural, the issue is the same: I am terrible at interpreting a scene
in an impressionistic kind of way — I see a building way-off in the
distance, and I think I have to draw a building; I see scree on the
side of a hill, I think I have to draw a million little rocks; et
cetera.

There's nothing wrong, per se, with the treatment in this  image, but
I have some issues with it.

My ideal is an image in which all of the forms are interesting, and
all of the forms are, to some extent, designed. When, as I've done
here, I get tied-up in textural effects and extraneous detail at the
horizon, it does a few things:

It distracts me from the forms in the image. Textures and unnecessary
rendering muddles them, makes them indistinct — and it's time
consuming — time that would be better spent refining a few
background elements and rendering them simply.

It distracts me from the composition, getting mired in an area that
represents 5% of the total image, and which is not a focal point
anyway.

Those unnecessary details are invariably the worst drawing in a
piece. If you're concerning yourself with completeness, then you've
deprioritized concreteness. Better to get a few things in well than
get a lot of things in badly.

An extension of that last point is that unnecessary background
details always break the flow of good draughtsmanship. I've noted
before that artists who excel at working in line achieve a kind of
linear harmony throughout an image. If you're nosed into your page
and are doing some pointless micro-rendering on a background detail,
you are not taking the linear consonance of the whole image into
consideration.

All of my favorite cartoonists and illustrators figured this out at
some point, and they're all great at suggesting backgrounds rather
than neurotically depicting them.

I will work on this.

--
Excerpted from:

PUBLIC NOTES (H)
http://alph.laemeur.com/txt/PUBNOTES-H
©2017 Adam C. Moore (LÆMEUR) <[email protected]>

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