📝 Learning From Other Artists

Studying Chris Ware's drawings

‘That’s really the only thing I’ve ever been able to do, is kind of draw. It seemed to me like a miraculous sort of ability.’ — Chris Ware

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I believe that creative lessons can be found in the most ordinary objects and designs if we adopt a curious and studious attitude toward our surroundings.

The New Yorker magazine’s covers are a big source of inspiration to me. On them, I have discovered several artists whose artwork not only I love seeing and appreciating, but also, whose processes and styles have taught me so much: Steinberg, Christoph Niemann, Sempé, Chris Ware… to name a few. The latter has indeed, been a more recent discovery, and for all of you - who are familiar or not with his art - I would recommend watching this delightful piece before continuing to read this post:

The thing is that I recently found Chris Ware’s Monograph at Auckland’s Public Library and spent an evening studying Ware’s illustrations in more detail, taking notes, and testing ideas in my sketchbook.

To my surprise when I went to pick up the book (I had it reserved), this was a large, large format and really would have been difficult to carry it back home, but it was a lovely surprise: not only I got to spend some time at the library, but also, it meant that Chris Ware’s drawings were published at the same scale and format he drew them, therefore, easier and more interesting to look at.

These are some notes and lessons I took when studying Chris Ware’s drawings:

1. Abstracting the point of view.

   Ware tends to represent his scenes in either elevation or isometric perspective. This gives him a big constraint, but also remarkable agility in drawing within an established framework (I am a fan of self-imposed drawing constraints as a process of discovery).

   His illustrations remind me of the architectural drawings I am so familiar with, and the use of abstraction in the point of view means we the readers don’t get distracted by the context and can focus our attention on the most important details in the frames (and the story): the people and their conversations, the few words, the new elements, the colour and emotion of the scene…

2. Using different frames to compose the page and tell the story.

   One of the things that jumps out immediately when you see a page drawn by Chris Ware is the way he composes the frames and scenes on the page. Ware uses a grid of, mainly, squares or almost square-like shapes of different sizes aligned with each other. This helps him tell his story step by step, focusing the attention on particular details, but also, with the use of different sizes of squares, he establishes a hierarchy (or a continuity) of events.

   He tends to also use particular points of view for specific frames. For example, in the larger frames he uses isometric or elevation, showing the context or the main scene, whereas in the smaller frames, he reveals specific details, objects abstracted from its context.

3. Paying attention to the picture’s edge.

   This has been a big lesson I am just starting to grasp and I am so interested in, and will definitely write more about it in detail.

   Recently I read in Art & Fear (a book I strongly recommend): Making art depends upon noticing things—things about yourself, your methods, your subject matter. Sooner or later, for instance, every visual artist notices the relationship of the line to the picture’s edge. Before that moment the relationship does not exist; afterwards it’s impossible to imagine it not existing. And from that moment on every new line talks back and forth with the picture’s edge. People who have not yet made this small leap do not see the same picture as those who have—in fact, conceptually speaking, they do not even live in the same world.

   These lines came to me when I was studying Chris Ware’s drawings, and suddenly, I became one of those people making that small leap. It is very obvious in his work: people, tres, buildings… some objects are cropped by the picture’s edge and some are not, some lines intersect with the picture’s edge and some others run parallel. It is difficult to describe, one has to appreciate it visually: wander your glance around the edge of every picture, and pay attention to the relationship between elements.

This is a quick sketch of my lounge where I experimented with applying all the lessons I learned from Chris Ware’s drawings:

The big frame is the view from the armchair toward the widow, showing the low shelf and all the plants. The small frames show details of my wandering glance at the plant next to me and the Transport for London poster in front of me on the wall.

I’d like to point out, though, that analysing, almost dissecting, other artists’ pieces and testing them in your drawings, is not about copying a particular style but learning from the artist’s process. It’s really looking beyond the surface and understanding the mechanisms that make these pictures work. It means that the next time you’re playing with different media or subjects, or themes even, you’ll have an extra set of tools, and choices, to experiment with. I don’t publish graphic novels and comic strips as Chris Ware does, but I am definitely taking his lessons to the type of drawings and pictures I do regularly (architectural or personal ones).

Rick Rubin puts it really nicely in the chapter Submerge (The Great Works) in his beautiful book The Creative Art: A Way of Being:

Exposure to great art provides an invitation. It draws us forward, and opens doors of possibility.

✏️✨

Happy sketching!

Ana

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All images and text © Ana Vila