📖 The Quote
‘Everything makes a different sort of line. And I’ve always enjoyed making different kinds of lines. I happen to like drawing. I draw all the time.’ - David Hockney (Spring Cannot Be Cancelled)
✏️ The Drawing
Step 1. Choose the view of a space or a landscape. Take a photograph, sketch live or draw your design from your imagination.
This is a similar exercise to the one we did on colour and abstraction, but this time we are deliberately drawing lines and patterns instead of colouring shapes. Also, this will be a drawing more than a sketch. We will be reflecting more thoroughly on the lines we are about to represent. We will take some time to think and draw.
Step 2. Consider the elements or the layers that compose your image and assign a colour to each of them.
For example, in my drawing below, I am illustrating the three different layers of intervention my design adds to the city: the existing (dark grey), the mobility infrastructure and services (purple) and the park (green).
Step 3. Draw each of the elements or layers with either lines or patterns. You can use abstract patterns to colour-code areas (I tend to use tiny lines to represent grass surfaces).
The colours in your drawing could either represent different objects, illustrate elements at different depths or convey light and shadows.
💡 Some Ideas
We have already stressed how powerful colour is to visually communicate ideas. These are some examples of how to combine colours and lines in your drawings:
Sketch with different colours to help layer your drawing’s information.
In this fantastic drawing of his house in Normandy, David Hockney uses three colours (red, brown and black) to convey space and distance in the same hue.
Also, artists tend to use blue or a different colour to sketch the composition of a drawing or painting as a sort of WIP line that remains faded or disappears in the artwork.
Use different colours and patterns to illustrate different motifs. A great example is Nigel Peak’s book ‘In The Wilds’, where he uses a composition of patterns in specific colours to represent the fields, the barns and roofs.
Cheers and happy sketching! 💫✏️
Ana