Your stance and balance are vital and so is your ability to mime what you see
Once you have all your preparation done, before making an actual drawing you will need to think about the drawing you need to visualise before you make a drawing.
When teaching observational drawing I have always started with the toes. These are as far away from the eyes and head as we can get, but awareness begins here, because without an awareness of our feet and toes we will easily become off balance. To be in balance is also to feel healthy and alive and a balanced point of view from which to observe and to respond, is one of the things we are aiming to achieve.
Your stance is going to be vital. If you are standing to draw, you will need your body to be as relaxed as possible and ready to respond sensitively to any eye/brain/hand implications that your looking implies. Balance will depend on how well your feet are 'planted' on the ground. However if you are too firmly set there will not be enough response or springiness in your step and a drawing will lack the full range of rhythmic touches. Therefore begin with this exercise.
Position yourself at an angle between your easel* and the subject that you are going to draw. If possible stand, because this will enable you to access the full range of your body’s movements, but I realise as I get older, that standing for long periods becomes harder and harder, therefore use discretion here and decide what is best for you in terms of your own fitness and physical capability.
Begin to move your toes and start tightening and relaxing your muscles, feel for the muscles in the rest of your right foot, work along to your ankle and now do the same with your left foot. Move on to your calf muscles, tighten them and then relax. Think of your knees, upper thighs, stomach, back and ribs, slowly working up through the body and becoming aware of each set of muscles as you do this. Eventually you will get to the shoulders and then arms. Spend more time here, move your shoulders around in their sockets, then upper arms, and elbows, eventually moving to your wrists, hands and individual fingers. Make tight fists, splay out your fingers, touch each finger to each finger lightly, imagine holding something between your fingers and watch your movements as you rotate fingers and wrist together and then separately.
Finally you need to move your neck muscles, again tighten and free them, moving your head forwards, backwards and sideways and in rotation both clockwise and anti-clockwise. Now move on to the muscles of the face, scrunching up eyes, pulling strange gurning faces, sticking your tongue out, until if you are in company, you have no inhibitions or worries about looking strange or weird, or if on your own, you simply become face lost or not bothered about what you might look like.
Now look at your subject, take a step towards it and back from it, one step to the left and back again then one to the right and back again. Now do this again, this time between each step breathe from the diaphragm. At last you can begin to look at your paper; is it set at the right angle? Is it too high or too low? What is the angle between your subject and your paper, how far do you have to move your head and body in order to look from your subject to the paper?
Decide on where your central drawing position is going to be. Now pull yourself up to your full height, begin with your toes again, up through your legs, body, neck and head. Imagine a string attached to the top of your head, think of its position right above your spine and allow it to pull you up. Now relax.
This is a good time to make any adjustments needed to your paper and easel or other supports. Make sure all is firmly attached and tightened up and readdress your stance.
This time begin to move your hand around the paper, move it to the top edge, try a long horizontal straight movement with your arm, think about shoulder control, elbow and wrist. Now move your hand to the centre of the paper. Touch it with the extended index finger of your drawing hand. Slightly rock your body from your toes, knees and hips and see if you can steady the body by simply allowing your finger to bend with the movement. Now do this with all four corners of the paper.
Once you are aware of these corners, you can begin cross movements, going initially from bottom left to top right, then top right to bottom left. Once you feel in control of these movements, try bottom right to top left and top left to bottom right. How in control are you? Think about balance again. Are you always in balance as you make these movements?
Now step back from the paper, look across at the subject you want to draw. Begin searching with your eyes, look left and look right, look up and look down. Can you ‘see’ your body movements in the subject before you? You have just been stretching to the left and right, crossing your hand from the bottom to the top of your paper, but can you ‘feel’ this or ‘see’ this in your mind as you look at the subject?
Begin to look for relationships. Look for one point at for example to the right of your subject, perhaps slightly above the centre of your subject. Look horizontally across from this, what significant things can you see? Look vertically down and do the same thing. Now look across your subject at an angle of approximately 450and see what relationships you can spot along this imaginary diagonal.
You can carry on looking for as long as you feel comfortable, but after a while you will need to begin embodying your looking. I think of this as a sort of mime.
Go back to looking at your paper, repeat the process of becoming aware of your body and this time try and think about how breathing and moving are synchronized. Do you breathe out as you make a long horizontal movement with your arm or do you breathe in? Move and breath for a while until you feel relaxed. Beware of doing this too forcibly; you can get dizzy if you are not careful but if you do feel dizzy, simply sit down and relax.
Now return to looking at your subject and this time transfer the looking to the space in front of your paper, begin to mime over your paper what it is you are seeing. Try and gently touch the paper with a slightly bent but still extended index finger as you do this. What sorts of curves do you need to make, where does a curve begin in your body? Does it start with a roll of the hips, or the bend of a knee? What is the smallest curve you can see and how will you make this? Is it a roll of the wrist or a twist of the fingers? What sorts of straights are there? Can you lock your shoulder/elbow/wrist/fingers in such a way that you can move these interconnected body parts together in a straight line? Do you have to rock your body backwards and forwards as you do this in order to keep an even pressure on that bent index finger as it lightly touches the surface of the paper?
Now go back to looking at your subject. However this time as you look, can you bring in those mime movements and play them out in the space between you and the subject? As your eye looks at for instance a long straight edge, can you mime the drawing of it? This is a sort of body dance. You are trying to choreograph your movements to become in tune with the rhythm of relationships that you find as your eyes move over the subject. You are in effect attuning your body to the perceived world.
Once you begin to feel comfortable with these movements, try to remember them and now practice making these movements back over your paper surface, again lightly touching the surface with a slightly bent index finger. This is very like learning dance moves and you need to open your mind out into a physical space, so that you can orchestrate your body movements in your visual imagination.
Do not at this stage worry about making a drawing. The wonderful thing about the ‘miming’ of a drawing is that you can do this anywhere and you don’t really need any drawing materials. You can imagine where the easel and paper are and practice transferring the mime from the imaginary space in front of the subject to the imaginary space in front of the drawing paper.
Eventually you should be able to build up a range of movements not too dissimilar to those you might employ when undertaking Tai Chi or a choreographed dance. Go back through the movements you are making and think about how you can make smooth transitions between them. Think about how the body can move forwards and backwards between the looking positions and the drawing positions, move carefully into the angles of looking that you need to make in order to see the subject and transfer this seeing onto the paper. Try and slow these movements down in order to know them more intimately and then as you feel you have them in your mind, begin to speed them back up again. Once you have developed an idea of a rhythmic set of movements begin to think about using a range of speeds, slow large movements, perhaps interspersed by faster small movements of the body. For instance a long sweeping movement of arms coming from the hips, contrasted with tiny fast finger flicking. At this point you may well begin to become more interested in one approach over another, that's ok, this is simply your own sensitivity reasserting itself.
At this point you might try returning to the beginning again. Stand tall, stretch out your spine and then begin moving through the dance of mime drawing, in your mind you should be able to 'see' the drawing evolve as a series of gestures overlaid one over the other, each one staying in the mind long enough for you to be able to 'see' it behind each new gesture before it fades away.
Once you feel totally at one with your drawing mime and your body flow feels synchronised with your looking, then you are ready to move on the the next stage; Drawing and Mindfulness: Part Three: making the drawing. However, you don't have to ever make a physical drawing and if you want to, you can make these exercises part of a stand alone routine designed to attune your mind and body relationship.
*See the previous post on choosing an easel or support for your drawing.
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