📖 The Quote
‘Movement attracts us. If there is a group of people standing still in front of us, and one person moves, we see it. The eye is always looking for motion.’ — David Hockney
✏️ The Sketch(es)
Step 1. Choose the view, object or person you’d like to sketch.
Make sure it’s a dynamic subject or space: whether it’s people moving, objects changing place, or traffic passing by. We are going to sketch it in motion.
Step 2. Choose three different colours, one for each sketch.
Step 3. Sketch the scene at three different times, using one colour for each, overlaying them on the same drawing sheet.
At the end of the process, you’ll get three stills overlayed in the same drawing, and because we used different colours you’ll be able to read the effect of movement and time passing by.
💡 Some Ideas
This is a classic exercise in life drawing sessions1, where the subject performs different poses. By overlaying the sketches on the same paper, you get the effect of depicting the body in motion.
In urban landscapes or in designing spaces, we can use this practice to depict time and changing atmospheric conditions, such as shadows and people moving and making use of different spaces. The use of different colours helps us read each of the moments we are representing.
Play with different techniques, scales and patterns to depict each of the layers. In my example above I introduce two more elements: words and scale. The lyrics are written in different colours depending on who is singing them, and when they both sing together the colours overlay. The figure in yellow is drawn at a different scale, to give more detail and background. It makes the drawing even more dynamic.
All pictures are, in one way or another, time machines, as Martin Gayford says in ‘A History of Pictures’. In doing this exercise you make these layers of time more obvious in your drawing. In Photography, the analogy would be to overlay different stills or to create a long exposure image.
🖼 The Artist
Christoph Niemann’s ‘Pianoforte’ is a book full of motion drawings - a visual journal of Niemann learning to play the piano. His monochromatic drawings are a synthesis of different moments in time (or of his imagination) while he’s practicing.
By not using colour (as opposed to the exercise we did of distinguishing the layers), he merges all these different moments into a single, dynamic and powerful image. The result, among others, is these fantastic drawings of the multiple tangled fingers playing the keyboards and the double-headed Tchaikovsky-Niemann in action.
💫✏️
Happy sketching!
Ana
Have you been sketching this week? It would be great to hear about it! Please, leave a comment and share your thoughts down below :)