Proportional Divider The Best Keep Secret to Improve Your Drawing

you and one of the things I learned all along the way is learning how to use a prospect now in the years that I've been teaching it's almost like I started teaching when abstract and modern art kind of word was that the the pinnacle of where it was supposed to be so in the 70s I would say that's pretty much where abstract art you had done everything you possibly can and everything else is a copy of what was done and so in the colleges I'd go to college and they would teach me art and I would sit there and go oh no there's nothing here I mean I walked out of thick I got I stepped out of the Stanford out of there program because it was just pure gibberish it would have had no value whatsoever I mean it was just like kindergarten kids running around with buckets of paints from ladders and stuff I mean it had nothing to do with fine art at all when into the Academy of art and I got thrown out of it because I criticized one of the teacher like teach us how to do something in here I'm coming in like a beer stout artist and they're flinging paint across the room in the process of teaching I've learned a few things I'd observe I'd look at Leonardo da Vinci and read his read his nuts trying to find some missing links because there weren't YouTube videos there wasn't anything nobody talked about temperatures when did you finally hear about temperatures no no and you in fact a lot of those colleges now don't even speak of them because they don't know really what they are surprising how many artists don't really even understand what that is but I figured that out I figured out you know edges and how the brain works and all this stuff I've did because I've worked with you guys for 40 years I've worked longer with you guys than people work in their careers I should have two gold watches on us I still haven't gotten one and none of you get the clue like hey let's get them a gold watch so and things pop up and all of a sudden something pops up and at one point this pops up and I go what's that and they and I was kind of like and and the student who popped up she says I don't know and I don't know how to use it I don't know why I had it I just know I had to buy it I was like hmm interesting so I started playing with this and I realized this is a tool that was actually invented back in the Leonardo da Vinci day in fact they even think it goes back to ancient Greece and here I had been teaching for twenty years and I'm like going what's this surely two pieces of plastic and a thing and this was exactly the one that I saw so it's been around for a long time so up until the day I would rely now I've taken a lot of finger drawing classes and if you ever really want to learn how to do figure drawing or just Ryan in general you should be in a figure drawing class preferably a nude figure drawing class because that way you know you're taken from a teacher he's really been taught I recommend do not take drawing classes you will want to kill yourself halfway through there's nothing more boring than to take a beginning drawing class you'll take the pencil and start stabbing your eye to stay awake wasted time figure drawing classes there and I was fortunate at the academy of art to have one of the most amazing teachers ever in fact a lot of ways that I teach is the way she teaches her name was KC Fitzsimmons and she's wrote a book on the skills for figure drawing you can buy it on Amazon so back then pretty much I would I would kind of propose doing figure drawing classes which basically is a gesture drawing and then you kind of use your drawing skills but for a lot of people it's very intimidating and most of students that are in my classes are beginning students going into art in their later years and they don't want to go into a figure drawing class so up until one point I would I would tell them well just go ahead and draw it and we'll just kind of piecemeal it and put it together again and try to do other people would sneak home and they had opaque projectors in fact there's some of my students that are still closeted opaque projector things and then go I said did you up a project this and go oh no and you know at at one time I had I believe them I go no she would never lie to me but then I found this and this clarified a lot was going on so the problem is with it opaque projectors you got a lens just like you had with cameras now with back in the day you had you know fish-eyed lenses to get like the wide shot and what would happen to the outside of that it all distorted but it was all kind of believable well even the smallest of lenses does that to your image even when you're taking an image you have a distortion but when you put it into a no paper jekt er that distortion is magnified hugely although if everything is kind of drawn in proportion you don't see it and you think it's like Oh fine and I know about up a projector and for those people that use OKPAY projectors be wise because I was so addicted to opaque rejecters back when I was fourteen thirteen twelve thirteen because it was just a great wait I didn't have to learn how to draw so but the problem is my the window from my opaque projector was this big and I started getting to the point where I wouldn't paint anything unless it fit under my opaque projector and so I ended up giving my opaque projector away because I knew as long as I had that I would never learn how to draw so out with the opaque projector then all of a sudden I had students that come in and go well what about grids and you know yeah Michelangelo Leonardo da Vinci use these breeds and you'd have a pitcher and you would have all these grids everyone it's a square inch and all this stuff and then you kind of draw this inch and then you draw this inch and then you kind of combine this and that's great too the problem is you're only ever drawing like this little square and the problem that I have with students especially retired students that are a little hard as seen and a little shaky is that these lines would never be exactly where they were supposed to be so if this square was just a little bit off that would throw this off and all of a sudden you know you start stretching and one little mistake there starts to get all the way magnified all the way to the end so you have this outside here it's really messed up so this wasn't a good idea was way too tedious and you had to know a lot of math so I said nah so so I found this tool here it's called a proportional divider this particular company has a called prospect and we'll have some on our website information so you can order it you have to order a dick like this thing is such a handy gadget that you and I'm surprised you can't find it and Michael's yeah but you have to order them and the thing is I don't think any order should live without it no they don't no and it's like this should be art one if you know this is this is this is the tool and I have students and the reason why I'm bringing this up in here I have students in this class some of you are sitting right here I'm preaching to the choir that I will say where's your prospect and I hear them go on I don't know I never use that I can never figure it out so I'm going to tell you how to figure it out I know finally yeah how do I you how do I do this yeah so I put this really simple picture here I just thought it was really cool and we're going to like put it here and I'm not going to spend a lot of time doing this but I just want you to kind of see the beauty of it the whole idea behind a prospect or a proportional divider it takes something small and makes it large but you might say oh Stefan I'm a plein air painter I can't use one of those and I go fully on you yes you can because you can actually stand outdoors and hold this up and take a measurement of a mountain and put it onto your canvas you just have to kind of get to a point where you keep everything kind of steady but in the process of checking things you can kind of do that for a couple of minutes and see where something is wrong and your drawing so these are actually used that way in fact the picture that it comes with actually is of somebody measuring a real thing that you could put on your canvas if you're sitting down at it in your studio and you wanting to draw something this would alleviate a lot of problems you measure from the small one but then the students go oh but all these buttons I don't know how to run this okay so anyway these are called proportional dividers right now in the market you have a red one you have a black one this one runs like 12 dollars and I think this is like $11 this has more holes in it than this one that really doesn't matter too much it used to be six I know they keep on it's two pieces of plastic you think they'd be like 80 cents but they have to make a profit they don't sell a lot of these so the black ones are out there on the market they're fine the red ones are out there they're fine they're called proportional divider if you go into eBay and you look at proportional dividers now these have been around forever you'll find ones that sell for this price you know seven ten twelve dollars and then all of a sudden you look at the high end of them and they go up to two three four six dollars architects use these tools and the ones that you buy for architecture are a lot more refined so this is a prospect and we Darla and I bought one of these together I think there were like a hundred and thirty dollars and they come in this fancy-schmancy box if you're paying $130 you want to make sure you have a box then okay this has the same thing instead of having the little plastic dials you've got this little metal thing here that you can slide back and forth and lock it that way when you lock it it doesn't move around that those lock also the problem with this is that it's heavy it's made out of metal and the ends are so sharp that you end up putting blood on your canvas you can't help and I've dropped this a couple of times on my feet and it was gone right through the shoe I mean it is like anything is it's not any better this is not better I would not spend more than $15 on a prospect it's crazy yeah it's crazy this is this is a waste of money so don't buy just because you pay for more it's it's better it's not okay so the way did you start off with this and I'm just going to show you briefly with my crayon okay so let's let's say here's your drawing here's your canvas now what I do real quickly is I want to I want to gauge my prospect so that whatever whatever I'm drawing and most likely your drawings are usually a lot smaller most of the time if you have an object that you're drawing from and real it still applies the same way so like instead of looking at the drawing this way you're going to be looking at the drawing through your hand like this close one I kind of go down and you'll be measuring the object and then you'll be drawing here to make it bigger now if you're looking at something big like I'm really close to Chris here in more ways than one but right now I'm physically close to you and I want to take her image and put it on the canvas but I want to make her smaller I reverse it so if I go this way I can take her measurement there and I can put that little things so they're reversible so it's two tools for the price of one so you can make things smaller and you can make things bigger but you get no distortion problems so I picked this up out of the box or it came out of the package how do I get this to work now if I go like this obviously the picture is like and you can see I always measure from the small side here and I draw with the big side but if I measure from here to here it's not going to fit okay what I do this is my canvas what I do is I move this in here and let's say I move it up two notches and surprisingly this is pretty hard plastic and I go from here to here see the spaces on death so I'm gauging it again I'm guessing I think that's the biggest problem with people who use these things that they don't guess I'm thinking oh let's move it up to let's see what happens measuring with the small end Wow see how I adjusted that so now what I would do is that I know it's relatively in the right spot is that I would start off saying okay I want my dog head here I want another dog head to here I want this here there's a basket data that data data okay so that's so what I do now is that I take the dog head here and I go oops my guesstimate is a little off so I make this bigger same thing over here now what's really important with this that I found is that it the key to working with a prospect because it's really hard to know if this is a hundred percent accurate to this in here so I always find a spot in the middle somewhere so I will actually put a spot on my my drawing or if you're looking at it at a model like a jug or something that you're painting I'd find a reflection or some spot that I can have that I can measure from be consistent and then what I do is I try to mark that spot on my canvas so this becomes my spot and then from there I measure from that spot outwards everything from this painting starts to measure out from there measure this from here to here now the beautiful thing about this C's so if I want to know where the eyes are here this is one eye this is another eye and then here's another right now look at the angle that it's at I'm going to take the angle of my prospect put that in but I'm measuring from that center point out putting in the next eye now the problem that you have with the with this it's not a problem but just at just an observation is that if I tell you where the top of the head is and where the bottom of the head is and where the eyes go and where the nose goes and you put all these dots in where they're supposed to be then you still have to draw the line between those dots to connect those dots you still are responsible but if you know where they are it's a lot easier to do that now drawing is not about finding where the line is there's a lot of the big mistake that a lot of people have when they draw is that they pretty much think oh I'm going to draw the outline of something so they look at the line and they kind of draw like this and they kind of and then they wonder why everything gets out of proportion drawing is not about that it's not about finding the line in your drawing drawing is about finding where the proportions are where exactly is this and how much space does it take up till this line comes in that's the key to draw it's this shape here we're interested in this shape that mass and we're just putting a line there a line there a line there so if I tell you this is where the top of the the puppy's head is this is where the bottom of the Pepe's at is this is the edge of the puppy this is the edge of the puppy then you could pretty much draw the circle where this goes so but if you know that so it's the proportion it's the space in between the object that we do now this tool will actually teach you to draw because what will happen is that you start looking at the spaces the worthies these endpoints here and you still have to be able to connect the dots to get the shape same way in here too so you're still using that but what happens after a period of time is that you'll find out that your eye will get so so so corrected that you don't need this at all anymore and you'll actually be able to see the proportions of things increasing the quality of your drawing you will learn how to draw with this it's not a crutch it just corrects you and oftentimes with students I have them draw something and I just check it with this so they'll draw it freehand I'll say where's your prospect amigo it's somewhere here and I say let's pull it out let's see if you're correct and I just run and say yep yep yep it's an easy way to just correct your drawing you know if you know your drawings correct you don't have to worry about it so much anymore so it's really a valuable valuable tool but there are times when going for this you want to put these puppies into a big park and that's where it's really important to know the center point and the size so what I would do is this were bigger canvas let's just say we're going to go out here and this is a bigger canvas this is a park and I want to put these guys over here what I would do is again draw the at the abstract of it you know two two puppies there here's a basket iiiii okay I would draw the acida the the yes the abstract of it okay and then here again too if I would take this to this you could see my prospect isn't quite set so I would go and make this a little bit smaller and I would get this till if this matches where I went here then I find a sinner and I draw outwards this way this way this way this way this way this way this way now the problem is is it you're going to end up with some measurements out here that are at an angle or difficult to get because you can't just measure everything from out here so what I ended up doing is I end up putting a line on my canvas this way and a line on my canvas this way so if I'm looking at this here going back to our original size here and I'm putting a line here and a line here now I can measure from that line once I have the prospect set again notice that the center of the line is where I had it on this drawing here now I can actually go from that line and go up this way and find angles and proportions for things that are much more complicated like trying to find the the top of the foot of the dog you know so that's where that goes and I can measure from that line down to find out where I want my stuff so anyway so it's a little bit of a learning curve but not much not so much that you'd want to not use a prospect but use the prospect it is a great tool every order should have one there I could tell you that drawing is usually the pet peeve of artists you do need to learn how to draw but this will teach you how to draw it's really a valuable tool I'll relate the landscape well landscapes you can get away with a lot accuracy isn't quite as as important but you have elements that are inside the landscape that you have to know but even just to break it up into thirds I mean oftentimes I'll take my prospect and instead of using my fingers I'd go a third a third and sometimes so then you know so I would use that and sometimes you can see okay a mountain peak now you're looking at your mountain peak and then you can go okay the mountain peak is here but landscape painting really is kind of simple it's usually break it up into thirds and then you have like this mass the road sometimes people will make a mistake in the road and they'll make the road really like this when it should be like this and so here you would measure and see oh my god the road doesn't go up to there it goes down to here you can measure in thirds you can measure proportions of you know high it's great great for perspective in buildings in the distance getting and so it's just something you want to practice with but it's an awesome tool and you will use it use it use it and then before long you'll find out you won't be using it that much you

Channel: Stefan Baumann

Views: 443,077

Rating: 4.7143674 out of 5

Keywords: Plein Air, painter, Stefan Baumann, Landscape, painting, The Grand View, American National Park, How to paint, ALLA PRIMA, art, oil painting, wildlife, still life, Proportional Divider, Improve Your Drawing, Drawing, Sketching

Id: IskrS2uQ23Y

Length: 24min 3sec (1443 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2016