Ernest Knaufft

“ One artist makes it a thick line with a blunt pen, another a thin line with a fine pen, and another, like Moullier, makes it with a series of dots, but each of these methods is a matter of technic, and the rules of technic are arbitrary, not fixed as are the rules for drawing. You may invent your own technic, but you cannot invent perspective. ”

“ The Grassets are hieroglyphic-like designs or silhouettes; the Crispi, in his robe de chambre, which for want of the artist’s name we shall call the Don Chisciotte cut—“Don Chisciotte” you no doubt suspect is the Italian for Don Quixote, and it is the name of a cartoon paper—is a pure outline drawing.
Now let us take them in turn. Every printer will recognize that the Grasset designs are excellent, for they may be printed with greater ease than shaded drawings, and their simplicity is in perfect harmony with the solid black of type. ”

“ We cannot complete our chapter without mentioning that the styles of drawing we have suggested by no means exhaust the different methods at your disposal. While it is well to confine yourself to outline, or outline and solid black, or outline and slight shading, yet you may experiment in many more complicated methods, as seen in the Monet, and the Ringel d’Illzach, for even if you do not use these methods for illustrations they help you to observe the capital lights and darks in nature. ”

“ One need not go to an art school to see that a cast is white, and that its shadows are not as black as the shadows upon a bronze; but unless he trains his eye by observation to see this difference in other things, no tricks of pen-technic will help him when he comes to draw a white horse, or a white collar. He does not have to study portraiture in an art school in order to make a drawing in pen and ink, for his paper, from a photograph ”

“ You look at such a simple interior as in the Don Chisciotte room and you recognize at once that the lines in it which were horizontal in nature are governed by three laws; the portière rod and the side boards of the couch are drawn horizontal because the artist sees them in a front view—they are parallel to his eye—but the lines of the front of the bureau and the floor line behind it run up because they are lines seen not in front view, but seen diagonally, and they are below the artist’s eye; but the top line of the mirror runs down because it is above the artist’s eye. ”

“ You learn to see objects as on one plane. We fancy your knowledge of geometry is sufficient for you to understand what we mean, but let us go over the ground slowly so that it may facilitate our future explanations of perspective problems.
By a plane we mean a plain, a flat surface. A table top is a plane. But the plane the artist draws upon—say a sheet of paper—though he may let it lie horizontal on a table, is always considered a vertical plane, corresponding to a pane of glass in a window. ”

“ In these you will find the foundation of our teaching—that is, we do not say that a human face must be made by putting in a black line running obliquely from the nose to the lip, made with such or such a pen, such or such a crayon, ink, or charcoal, but we point out the line in nature, and say that because it is found in nature, artists put it in their drawings. When not found in a face, as that of a young person, then it is left out in a good artist’s drawing of a young face. ”

“ I think that an hour’s practice of this kind will soon convince you that the casual glance of the uneducated eye does not take in a complete or perfect view of an object, but that after you have studied an object with a view to drawing it, you begin to see with more thoroughness. ”

“ Not only is it true that without talent you must not expect to succeed in producing important pictures, such as full-page illustrations, double-column portraits, poster designs and large work in general, but it is almost more unlikely that you will succeed in designing the most simple tailpiece or initial letter. It is quite natural that you should suppose it a very easy task to design an initial letter or a tiny silhouette of a leaf or flower, a branch or wreath or two forming a “printer’s mark”; every artist in Christendom thinks the same—until he tries it ”

“ The drawing of Malthus, on the other hand, is not easy to understand, for in addition to the outlines it is modeled—that is, it contains masses of shadow which bring out the different planes of the face. And it is necessary to study light and shade, as indicated in Chapter VII, before we can fully understand a drawing of this kind.
In order to model, you must learn to see the light and shade upon objects. When your eye is trained to see light and shade, you can draw the hair as in the second Nietzsche, and you can see planes in the face, as in the Malthus. ”

“ For example, if you are drawing an old woman’s head, even if you only use four or five lines to represent her hair, you will not press upon your pen when you are doing her hair on the top, but you will press upon it when you come within the region of the ears; and that pressure, though it will not represent hairs, nor the actual value of the shadow, will yet give the difference between the light on the top of the head and the shadow behind the ears, and this will suggest to the educated eye the roundness of the cranium. ”

“ He is sensitive to the different degrees of darks upon the several objects. No matter how plainly he may see the shadow upon the cast, he knows that, in order to represent it as a light object, such shadows must not be black. So there is a vast difference between its dark tones and the dark tones of the block on which it stands. Also in drawing the human face he concentrates his darks about the eyes, nose and mouth; the rest of the face is shaded with great delicacy, for he knows that if he puts darks elsewhere he will get the undesirable effect of an old face. ”

“ There are few draughtsmen in the world more expert in the use of line than Forain. He is most wonderful in his construction of forms; every line means something. The French do not mind a free line—one that runs a little too far out—if it has meaning to it; hence we see a line through the butler’s nose, and his mouth extends to the right of the naso-labial line in quite an unnatural fashion, but since the line of the cheek is beautifully attached to the eyesocket and upper eyelid, it does not annoy the French at all. {143} Pen drawing by Guillaume, from the French daily paper Gil Blas. ”

“ WE WISH to supplement the preceding pages with a chapter on the technic of wood engraving, and a few words about kindred arts which are of special consequence to the illustrator-printer. The art of wood engraving I consider one of the most valuable things for the illustrator-printer to learn. True, this art is going out of use because of its tediousness; and, it must be confessed, if you wish a picture of a building in your paper, it is much more economical and you can get a better result if you make a pen drawing and send it to be photo-engraved, than if you engrave it on wood. ”

“ You, of course, know that when the art of printing was invented the types had to be cast, and the dies were naturally cut in the form of the letters of the manuscript of the country in which the printing was done. Caxton imitated the manuscript of the Low Countries and not that of England, when he printed the first book printed in English movable type. So, too, Gutenberg’s type imitated the German manuscript, while that of Aldus, tradition says, was cast after the manuscript of Petrarch, and that form has been called Italian or italic ever since. ”

“ Even if you are convinced that coated paper and the half-tone do not belong to ideal printing, how many can afford to attempt a piece of rough printing with heavy type, coarse paper and an outline device, and expect to retain his customers, when his rival, Smith, is using coated paper and half-tones that almost equal photographs? ”

“ IT IS difficult for the amateur to realize the value of a line as fully as the art student realizes it. We give an illustration of the first laying in or placing of a figure, as done in the Parisian art schools. The student who works for months and months in this manner sees a meaning in an artist’s lines that the casual observer misses. ”

“ You should be reminded that Engström is a caricaturist, and takes liberties with the art of drawing as well as with his subjects. The example we gave in Chapter I, his own portrait, was a perfectly consistent drawing, all pure outline; so was the “Hedin” (Chapter II) , because silhouette goes perfectly well with outline. But to model a hat as fully as in this “Fallström” drawing, so that under its rim is a shadow, and yet not have it throw a suggestion of a shadow upon the man’s head, is most inconsistent drawing—permitted the caricaturist only. ”

“ Many a printer is as well the publisher of a newspaper and feels that from time to time he would like to publish a caricature to enliven his pages, or at any rate he is interested in the cartoons in the illustrated press, and would like to know how they are done, and the best way to acquire this knowledge is to practice a little one’s self. Besides, the practice of caricaturing is most beneficial to every draftsman ”

“ LITHOGRAPHING.—Lithography, like copperplate, requires a special press, but a secondhand press can be bought for $25 or $30, and it is certainly the cheapest process known for short runs of pictorial color work; and any printer who has many orders for posters or picture printing would do well to investigate the process; for it is not difficult to draw on the stone, and, after the stones are bought, they last for years, and every new design simply necessitates the scouring off of the previous design, which will take a boy only about an hour. ”

“ A clever pen draftsman works in the same manner, using darks which the uneducated eye will take to be arbitrary blackening of the drawing, but which an artist knows is the result of the intelligent observation of the shapes of shadows, and of the most important shadows of a face. ”

“ One of the points we admire in an expert’s drawing is the use he makes of black spots. The Japanese have rules of composition, governing this distribution of spots, which they follow, balancing a black here with another there in an admirable manner. In our chapter on wood engraving we shall give some specimens of well distributed blacks. In our tailpiece by Grasset you will notice how on the right-hand side five petals and two buds balance a tri-parted leaf on the opposite side. One of the problems for the designer of printers’ devices is to balance them properly. ”

“ But when the lines are below the eye, as the floor line and the bureau lines, then they seem to run up to the horizon and are drawn slanting upward; while if they are above the eye, as the top of the mirror, they tip down to the horizon and are drawn slanting downward—the end farther away from the artist lower in the picture than the end nearer him. ”

“ When we come to the analyzation of the human face this fact of representing parts of the body by lines that are not outlines—i. e., not contour lines—will be still clearer to you. Now, the point we want to make is that the method of “placing” objects, recommended in the last chapter, is not a mere process of procedure in drawing, but is quite as important a mental training as the making of the most intricate outline—in fact, for the printer-draftsman it is more important than the latter. ”

“ Ordinarily, when an artist draws a thing of this kind—a button, a policeman’s badge, etc.—he makes the lower line a little heavier than the rest so as to suggest the shadow the object throws upon the coat; but Engström has omitted this. In the nose, however, we have not pure outline, but a distinct broadening of the line under the nose giving the same suggestion of its protruding and of its throwing a shadow as does Crispi’s mustache in Luque’s drawing. In the hat, moreover, we have both modeling—very good modeling, too,—and local color. ”

“ Although the David d’Angers diagrams were drawn to show the general masses of the head as they are brought out in successive stages by a sculptor, yet they become very interesting to the printer who has not had the benefit of an art school education, for they show him at a glance how much of the character of the human head is dependent upon the different planes of the face, and it explains better than words what is meant by planes. ”

“ A line is used, not only for drawing the outside outline or contour of objects, but for drawing the outline of shadows upon and within them; therefore, every bit of practice you may have in drawing lines of any kind will be helpful to you when blocking in the shapes of shadows that bring out the form of an object. ”