I'd like to have a casual, one way chin-wag with you, if I may, about construction lines. I can't promise this will have a nugget of wisdom at the end. I just realised the other day that I really quite like them and so I thought I'd write a bit about why that is. If you've decided this is already a waste of time, I've put a funny drawing at the end just for you as a reward for your perseverance. If you've already run to the hills, screaming of how you'd rather pitch a thousand chickens against one bear to see who would win rather than read about construction lines, fair play to you. That could actually be fairly entertaining to watch. Potentially horrific, but entertaining. Let's not speak of the paradox of aiming a statement exclusively at people who won't read it.
So, yes - erm, construction lines. Here we go.
Actually, having just finished this and reread it, I thought I'd, retrospectively, add this bit. Construction lines, for uninitiated, are those pencil marks you might see on a drawing that don't really seem to belong to the finished picture. Or even the pencil outline of something before it got drawn over with pen. Right. Onwards!
As some of you may know, I've been doing a one drawing a day thing for quite some time now (at the time of writing, 160 days straight). This was partly to see if I could stick with it, a smidge to force myself to draw some ideas I'd had for a long time but never actually sat down and drawn, and (so I told myself) mostly to actually practice drawing - something I'd never actively done before. So far the things I've practiced the most are hands and faces. As many artists I've had the pleasure of conversing with have told me, in lofty and elegant tones: "Hands and faces are a proper bugger to draw." Proportions and the eye's ability to pick up on tiny measurements to distinguish between different faces and all that. So I took to the internet and the juicy plethora of online tutorials that live therein. Most of these told of ways to construct a drawing to make it look right. If you build a house's foundations of jelly, the novelty will soon wear thin. As will the jelly. Basically, it taught me that if you get the hang of why a hand is constructed the way it is, it makes it a bum load easier to understand why that line is drawn at that angle and at that length for that part. To that end I ended up drawing a lot of boxes and circles and lines to make things line up and etc etc etc. Once the rest had been drawn in, I would often erase these lines so that the finished product was a thing of pure realism (ish).
Then I realised that I bloody loved these lines - for the same reason that I love watching the 'The Making of..." sections on DVD extras, the same reason I love seeing a building mid-construction, or (and this really doesn't happen enough any more - being a design trait that seems to have been consigned to the 90's) technology with clear casing. Even, to an extent, the same reason I love spotting continuity errors in TV shows and films. Most definitely seeing construction lines in other artists work. And I'll tell you why, before all these examples become wearisome.
Construction lines allow you to see behind the scenes.
A film or TV show or finished piece of art works because of 'the willing suspension of disbelief' (if you're now thinking of the Blackadder quote that I am, ten points to you). You temporarily allow yourself to forget that you are looking at flickering lights or inky blots on a page and are fine with that fact that it becomes something else. Construction lines allow you (or me, anyway. I might start writing 'me' instead of the proverbial 'you'. I'm not here to tell you what you like. Make up your own mind, dammit) to snap out of this. Also, and I think this may be what switches me on more than that, is it allows me to see why and how the drawing works. And what went wrong to get there. They kind of tell a story.
And, as an artist, they're a beacon of hope. Sounds corny but they genuinely are. Like a lot of creatives, the overcoming of self doubt has been something of struggle - seeing all these accomplished artists that I look up to and whose work I love. But most of the time I only see the finished thing and, thanks to the willing suspension of disbelief, I assume that the drawing just happened (N.B. I'm scrapping this whole 'me/I' thing. Doesn't read well). Not that it just suddenly appeared on the page, but that every line was drawn where it was just because that's where it went (I do realise that depending on the type of art we're talking about, this can be the entire point of the piece. In a lot of this I'm talking about graphic art type stuff). So what being able to glimpse a construction line does is to break through that and realise that there is a process behind the final piece. That they must have practiced, and learnt how to do what they do.
If you're puzzling over that Blackadder quote, it's in Blackadder goes Forth.
There's also the sense that you're seeing something you're not really meant to be seeing. There is an essence of side-boob about it. In the case of drawing a live nude, this may literally be the case. In other words, to use a phrase that may very well one day be used in a psychiatric evaluation: construction lines are, to me anyhow, the sexy lingerie of drawing.
That and my dad designs buildings and, as such, I've always kind of loved technical drawings. There may be a heady sense of nostalgia thrown into the mix.
So, there's why I love construction lines. If you were hoping that, despite what I said, a nugget of wisdom would appear at the end of this...er... 'Always stretch and warm up before doing any kind of strenuous exercise.'
Oh, and here's that drawing:
