Crutches & Bad Habits

I've been thinking about ways to measure and compare using my stick of charcoal when drawing. From the books I've read and courses I've done, I've learned a couple of measurement techniques for proportions, lengths and angles. Those include measuring angles and transferring them onto the drawing, gauging proportions by measuring the size of one part of the drawing and moving the charcoal over to another part, holding the charcoal horizontally or vertically to see if different, distant part of the drawing are correct in proportion to each other and using triangulation to derive a point from two existing ones.

My teachers at the Royal Drawing School are pretty strict when it comes to using these. Both Robert and Sharon don't like us measuring angles at all and Sharon even discourages us from doing the "fitting three heads into a body" measuring technique. The only thing they approve of is comparing parts of the drawing by holding our drawing utensil horizontally or vertically.

I can see how transferring angles from a scene to a canvas by moving over the charcoal isn't very accurate. On the other hand, I often feel lost drawing, especially in the beginning after having put down an initial rough draft of the person and these various measurement tools often show me which aspects of my drawing can be improved.

I'm less concerned with inaccurate measurements than I am with developing bad habits and depending on crutches that keep me from developing an intuition for sizes and proportions. Eventually, of course, I want to develop a fluency drawing that makes it possible to move on to more interesting parts of artistic expression.

I've been forcing myself to stop transferring angles and I'm trying to always draw before I measure, correcting if I have to but making an attempt at drawing what I see. At this point, I'm not quite ready yet to go all the way to what Sharon recommends and give up on angle and size measurements altogether, however I also don't want to become dependent on any of these tools.

I'll report back if I have any further thoughts on this, maybe I'll get a chance to speak to some more people about it next Saturday.