Sketch, Sketch, Sketch and Sketch Some More

Last summer I was asked by the Birmingham Museum of Art to do some presentations for Elderhostel groups in the fall on Leonardo da Vinci's drawing methods and materials in conjunction with the exhibition of da Vinci's drawings at the museum. While researching da Vinci, I discovered that he gave the same advice to young artists in the 15th century that they get today in the 21st century--sketch constantly.

Leonardo advised young artists to keep a small sketchbook for a nearly journalistic observation of the human figure in various poses or attitudes: "And with slight strokes take a note in a little book which you should always carry with you. It should be of tinted paper, that it may not be rubbed out, and when full exchange the old book for a new one; since these things should be preserved with great care. The forms and positions of objects are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them. Keep these sketches as your guides and masters."

Among Leonardo’s great innovations as a draftsman was his emphasis on the freshness of the sketching process: "You, composer of pictures, however, do not draw the limbs on your figures with finished outlines or it will happen to you, as to many different painters who wish every little stroke of charcoal to be definitive…Decide broadly on the position of the limbs of your figures and attend first to the movements appropriate to the mental attitudes of the creatures in the narrative, rather than to the beauty and quality of their limbs." In other words, get the essentials of position and movement.

You can sketch any time, any where. What great resource material for future paintings. Sketching keeps you "warmed-up" in the process of drawing. The skill of drawing was the backbone of artistic production and training in the Italian Renaissance and I believe it should be today.

Leonardo believed that any knowledge that could not be certified by the eye was unreliable. For him a drawing was a thought, a phrase, a sentence. His mind expressed itself in silverpoint, pencil, charcoal, or ink rather than in words. His sketches are a graphic representation which follows the course of his thoughts and his observations of the life of things.

We see better the things we observe by drawing.