* <<J0O3FM06>> Drawing notes (H3O)
Created: 3/24/2017, 10:21:13 AM

<http://alph.laemeur.com/img/H3O>

I need considerable improvement in my treatment of scenery. Urban or 
rural, the issue is the same: I am terrible at interpreting a scene 
in an impressionistic kind of way — I see a building way-off in the 
distance, and I think I have to draw a building; I see scree on the 
side of a hill, I think I have to draw a million little rocks; et 
cetera.

There's nothing wrong, per se, with the treatment in this  image, but 
I have some issues with it. 

My ideal is an image in which all of the forms are interesting, and 
all of the forms are, to some extent, designed. When, as I've done 
here, I get tied-up in textural effects and extraneous detail at the 
horizon, it does a few things: 

It distracts me from the forms in the image. Textures and unnecessary 
rendering muddles them, makes them indistinct — and it's time 
consuming — time that would be better spent refining a few 
background elements and rendering them simply.

It distracts me from the composition, getting mired in an area that 
represents 5% of the total image, and which is not a focal point 
anyway.

Those unnecessary details are invariably the worst drawing in a 
piece. If you're concerning yourself with completeness, then you've 
deprioritized concreteness. Better to get a few things in well than 
get a lot of things in badly. 

An extension of that last point is that unnecessary background 
details always break the flow of good draughtsmanship. I've noted 
before that artists who excel at working in line achieve a kind of 
linear harmony throughout an image. If you're nosed into your page 
and are doing some pointless micro-rendering on a background detail, 
you are not taking the linear consonance of the whole image into 
consideration.  

All of my favorite cartoonists and illustrators figured this out at 
some point, and they're all great at suggesting backgrounds rather 
than neurotically depicting them. 

I will work on this.

--
Excerpted from:

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http://alph.laemeur.com/txt/PUBNOTES-H 
©2017 Adam C. Moore (LÆMEUR) <adam@laemeur.com>