General considerations

Elements and principles of design

The principal element of drawing is the line. Through practically the entire development of Western drawing, this figure, essentially abstract, not present in nature, and appearing only as a border setting of bodies, colours, or planes, has been the vehicle of a representational more or less illusionist rendition of objects. Only in very recent times has the line been conceived of as an autonomous element of form, independent of an object to be represented.

Conscious and purposeful drawing represents a considerable mental achievement, for the ability to reduce the spatial objects in the world around one to lines drawn on a plane presupposes a great gift for abstraction. The identification of the motif of a drawing by the viewer is no less an achievement, although it is mastered by practically all human beings. The visual interpretation of a line as a representation of a given object is made possible through certain forms of that line that call forth associations. The angular meeting of two lines, for example, may be considered as representing the borders of a plane; the addition of a third line can suggest the idea of a cubic body. Vaulting lines stand for arches, convergent lines for depth.

With the aid of this modest basic vocabulary, one can distill comprehensible images from a variety of linear phenomena. The simple outline sketch—Greek legend has it that the first “picture” originated from copying the shadows on the sand—represents one of the oldest and most popular possibilities of graphic rendition. After decisively characterizing the form of Egyptian drawing and the archaic art of Greece, the outline sketch became the chief vehicle of artistic communication in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Used in a variety of ways in the early Renaissance, it became dominant once again in Neoclassicism, as it is, for that matter, in the classicist period of a given artist’s total work.

The outline sketch is elaborated into the detailed drawing by means of the line, which differentiates between the plastic and the spatial values of the object. Borders of individual objects, changes in the spatial plane, and varying intensities of colour applied within an outline sketch all tend to enrich and clarify the relationship between the whole and its component parts.

The free beginning, the disappearance, or the interruption of a line provides opportunities for gradually slurring an edge until it becomes a plane, for letting colour transitions fade away, for having the line vanish in the depth.

The thickening or thinning of a line can also be used to indicate, spatially or by means of colour, a change in the object designated by that line. Even light-and-shadow values may be rendered by differences in stroke strength.

While the chopping up of a line into several brief segments, and, even more, the drawing of individual lines running parallel in one direction, makes the outlined form appear less corporeal and firm, it reproduces the visual impact of the form in a more pictorial manner. Slight shifts in the flow of the line are intended to represent smooth curves and transitions; they also reinforce the effect of light striking a surface and thus give the corporeal appearance. Finally, short, curving segments of a line that do not stand in a clearly angular relationship to one another but are arranged on the sheet in loose formation allow the pictorial and colour component to dominate, as in the work of the 16th-century Italian artist Jacopo Tintoretto. An extreme case is the complete dissolution of the linear stroke into dots and spots, as, for example, in the drawings of the 19th-century Pointillist painter Georges Seurat.

A mere combination of these varied shapes of the line, without reference to the mediums in which the lines are drawn, provides the artist with a plethora of subjective opportunities for the expression both of general stylistic traits and of personal characteristics. An arrangement of forceful, mainly straight strokes in accentuated, sharp angles lends the drawing an austere character emphasizing dramatic and expressive traits. This method of drawing, in fact, is characteristic of stylistic epochs and artistic regions (not to mention individual artists) that prefer these qualities: in the rather sober city of Florence, in German Expressionism, where it is used to convey mood, but also in the drawings of Rembrandt and Vincent van Gogh. Soft lines, on the other hand, running in drawn-out, smoothly rounded forms and stressing graphic regularity above any statement of content, constitute the formal equivalent to elegant, courtly, and lyric qualities of expression. Accordingly, they are often found in drawings of the Soft style; in the early Renaissance, particularly in the work of artists from the Italian province of Umbria and in young Raphael’s sketches; in the work of Nazarenes, a 19th-century group of Romantic painters whose subjects were mainly religious; in the Jugendstil, a late-19th- and early-20th-century German decorative style parallel to Art Nouveau in its organic foliate forms, sinuous lines, and non-geometric curves; and in a very pure form in one of the classic draftspeople, the 19th-century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. A markedly even-stroke texture, with waxing and waning strokes in regular proportions and evenly distributed within the page, brings drawing close to calligraphic writing and is found in all stylistic epochs that value ornamentation.

The technique of hatching gives the line an additional potential for the clarification of plastic relationships and of light phenomena. In hatching, parallel, short, equidistant, more or less straight lines create static and tectonic (structural) values by marking individual body planes. Gently curved hatching stresses the roundness of the body and can also accentuate, as tone value, shaded parts of the representation.

Cross-hatching, in which two layers of hatching intersect at right angles, reinforces the body-and-shadow effect. Known since the days of Michelangelo and Albrecht Dürer in the 15th and 16th centuries, this artistic technique is often used with slanted or even curved hachures for the linear rendition of rounded parts. In rigorously monotone drawings, this method is the most suitable for the depiction of spherical bodies. The human body, with its highly articulated surface, can be modelled in this fashion very clearly and precisely. For 17th- and 18th-century engravers, this process became the most important means of drawing. All of these different possibilities of linear rendition can be achieved with pen and crayon as well as with the brush.