Never Draw an Ear
Advice to myself — Never draw “an ear.” Draw that particular person’s ear. In that particular light, at that particular angle. No one is made up of standard parts, like Mr. Potato Head. If you Google “great drawings of faces” or “faces crosshatching” you’ll see a lot of impressive technique. But also a lot of faces that seem to have come from stock parts. You don’t feel the artist looked at each detail of the face he was drawing, but just pulled the pieces out of a can of details. There’s no such thing as learning once and for all how to draw an ear, a nose, a lower lip. Every moment of every face is the first time those hundreds of unique shapes, angles, folds, pads, edges and tones have come into place this way. And the last time they will. Don’t worry about every freckle and hair. Don’t think you have to capture every proportion and tone of shade. exactly. But do look at every feature. Look at the overall expression. What are the details that make this person instantly recognizable to his friends? That is, what are the ways those ears are not like every other ear, and not like one another. It’s the details you’ve ever drawn before that are most needed in this drawing. If you’re haven’t looked up from your paper in the past five seconds, that part of your drawing is probably dead, though it is probably also, in one way, the most perfect part of your drawing — the most practiced, the most generic, the most everybody. The job of drawing isn’t to make an impressive composite of highly practiced elements found on the planet Earth. That’s just using clip art, even if it’s hand-drawn clip art. The job of drawing is to pick out the most interesting unique visual details of something and to relay those details to others who weren’t there to see this moment for themselves. And the key to that is to love seeing things for the first time. And the key to that is to know that everything we look at is an event as much as a thing — something that will look this way only once. Work on technical skill, but work twice as much on observing.
Camille Dinally: Your point well taken Tom. I do the same things too except for the time when Drew Batman and bypass the details of his ears. The client looked at me like I was crazy. So I had to go back and put some attention to his ears. - Kem
Tom Beaver: Always tempting to take a shortcut. I think it’s especially tempting in comic art, where it’s mostly drawn from imagination and the characters are pre-established and drawn over and over. I find that comics tend to be very strong on technique but often weak on obervation of the world — anatomy, in particular. And the poses are so extreme, so unnatural. I love comic art for technique, composition, color, but it rarely gives me the thrill of good caricature, good story illustration, good gesture drawings of the human figure. For me, the most exciting thing about visual art is the capturing of well-observed detail: facial expression, posture, body language, a sense of the gravity and physics working correctly, texture of surfaces, perspective, the difference between one kind of tree or shrub and the next, And so on. When I see five birds drawn in the sky and I can tell the artist dashed them all off in one five-second sweep of curvy V’s, not even changing the angle, I feel let down and a little resentful. Like someone tried to sell me a bag of bad apples with four nice ones on top.
Kathy Gavin:...and it doesn’t hurt to exaggerate unique features a bit sometimes.
Tom Beaver: Definitely. Exaggeration is almost by definition an act of closely observing — it means you’ve found the telling detail.
Mary Ann Ruckman: Bill did you know that my brother Donald was quite an artist, I’m sure Gloria would love to share his drawings and paintings with you
Tom Beaver: I heard that only recently. Would love to see his artwork. Wish I’d known that when Don and Gloria used to come out to their property on the farm. Don and I could have talked art or drawn pictures together.
Connie Patterson: Mary Ann Ruckman I remember seeing some of Uncle Donald’s drawings, but would love to see them again!
Jeff Stache: Friends, Romans, countrymen...