I know that some of the artists I am aware of like to use viewfinders to help them think about composition and selection. Some of them use these with a full and deep understanding of the implications of doing this, but others don't, so I thought I'd as normal ramble around the subject and see if I can pick out some issues that might help you decide to make use of them or not.
A typical bought viewfinder
The advantages of working with a viewfinder when making objective drawings is that you can use them to isolate your subject matter by limiting your field of vision and cutting away your need to scan and look at areas of visual information that could otherwise distract you. They also allow you to think about aspect ratio and how that might effect the compositional needs of your selection. All useful things, but they do come with certain implications. The first one of course is the impact of the rectangle itself. We don't see in rectangles but have become used to seeing compositions within them because cameras produce rectangular images and we look through a lot of rectangular windows, paper is cut into rectangles and our paintings are usually displayed in rectangular frames; but just because these things are familiar doesn't mean they are right or the only way to do things.
Looking within a rectangle also changes the way we see things. Our peripheral vision is cut off, our visual scanning processes are restricted and the situation we are looking at is made far less dynamic. We have in effect captured the view in a cage or trap.
However they can be useful, for instance the one shown above, the 'Artist’s View Catcher', is 3 1/2 inches square, with a window opening that you can adjust by using a sliding panel. Markings along the side help you set common aspect ratios linked to sizes such as 8 by 12 inches or 11 by 14 inches. The sliding panel has a small hole that you can use to judge local colour or tonal value and as the viewfinder is a neutral grey, this gives it more use value. I must admit it's much better than the ones I have used in the past made from 4 strips of paper and 4 paper clips, or old 35mm projector slide mounts but it will often cost you over £10. The cheapest I could find was Jacksons.
35mm slide mount
There are other viewfinders that also allow you to identify local colour, and make comparisons with set tonal values, such as the Guerrilla painter composition finder.
You match up the colour strip on the left with a local or 'seen' colour and do the same with the tonal value scale on the right. The Pixiss Grey Scale Value Finder below then takes things to extremes, you get three cards to hang round your neck. One a squared off viewfinder, another a colour wheel and the third a tonal value finder.
Pixiss Grey Scale Value Finder
If you want to make a small drawing so that you don't have to even think about transferring what you are seeing to a sheet of separate paper, the Tom Lynch 'Secret Composition Tool' allows you to draw directly over your gridded up view, so that you can see what you are picking out. I'm not sure how it really works and it seems overly complicated to me but you never know some people must find it useful.
The Tom Lynch 'Secret Composition Tool'
Jackson's viewfinder is a much easier compositional tool to use. You draw directly on it with a wipe away blue marker
Jackson's viewfinder
Artists have used viewfinders for hundreds of years and they are the basis of all image transfer techniques before photography and chemical image capture.
Van Gogh's viewfinder consisted of three wires stretched across a frame to intersect in the middle, as shown in the sketch below that he put in a letter to his brother Theo to show how he planned to use it out on the dunes.
Van Gogh
Van Gogh would copy the viewfinder grid lines onto his canvases, and they can be seen with the naked eye if you get a chance to look at an actual painting in the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, where if you search long enough you can sometimes see traces of his drawn grids between brush strokes. As he said in a letter to Theo;
"You will have seen in my last letter the drawing grid that I told you about. I’ve just got back from the blacksmith’s, who made iron tips to go on the stakes and corners for the grid itself. It has two long stakes, and you can attach the grid either vertically or horizontally with solid wooden pegs".
The viewfinder as Van Gogh drew it in his letter to Theo, 5th or 6th August 1882
The Gridvu viewable grid system is one of the latest and has the advantage of also having diagonal lines printed onto the viewing surface. This does make it easier to use when using a viewfinder to draw portraits.
The Gridvu
Looking at a face through the Gridvu
Of course the mobile phone has replaced a whole range of tools, we use it to record sounds, take photographs, communicate and more recently to be a drawing grid maker.
Drawing Grid Maker app
You have probably seen the Drawing Grid Maker app used on Portrait Artist of the Year, it is a grid drawing utility program which draws a grid on top of an image which you can then use to guide you when you want to translate the image onto a canvas or onto paper. It has a very simple 5 step to use set of processes. Load a picture from your device or web browser (press and hold picture to share with Drawing Grid Maker from web browser). Set number of rows and columns. Set colour of grid. Set line width. Save the image and print it out, or display it on your monitor/tablet/phone while you draw. (It also has diagonal line settings so you can use it like theGridvu).
Another related device sold to help artists is the perspective viewer. It is similar to the viewfinder as it is transparent, but it also comes with perspective lines already in place, so that you can link a gradually growing knowledge of perspective with what you can actually see out in the world.
Perspective viewer.
Landscape seen through a perspective viewer
Again I have all sorts of problems with these perspective viewers as we don't actually see in perspective. These are usually about 8 by 4 or 5 inches in size, allowing you to move between your images and your views. However I have also seen students use these very effectively, so perhaps my personal views on the matter don't really mean anything, the reality is, if it helps use it, especially if what you are trying to do is to unravel the complexities that surround how we look and how and why certain visual conventions such as perspective work.
Most people first come across the grid system in the art room as a device for copying pictures. This video is a typical school teaching aid.
How to copy a photograph
I still find it interesting to think about grids and so do other artists. Betty Tompkins made the drawing 'Fxxk Grid #20' in 2005.
Betty Tompkins: 'Fxxk Grid #20'
Tomkins' drawing tells us a lot about copying from photographs using a grid system. It is as an image very flat, the angle of pencil stroke has little variation because the information does not come from surfaces that change direction as they move over a three dimensional form, the tonal values sit in a very narrow range and texture is diminished because there is no direct experience of a textured surface from which to draw from. It is in fact a very 'dead' image. Although this is not Tomkins' main point, this is not the image is of a dead person, it comes from a series of images about how women are used in pornography, but the way it is made in effect 'deadens' or 'kills' the image and for myself, gives this image an added poignancy. The grid becomes a trap or cage and the very flat copying of a photograph signifies that the images of women for pornographic uses, are in effect 'flattening' or 'killing' them. The dead hand of the pornographer squeezing the life out of the image, the women 'trapped' in their situation.
Composition using rectangular frames is about selection. You can use 4 strips of paper to find new compositions within existing images, or to focus on one area with a view to changing it so that it pops out of the rest of the image. But selection can be done by making lots of small drawings from either existing work, photographs or reality.
Torn paper strips
Sometimes torn paper is a better solution, tiny drawings on awkward shapes can be a road to invention because you are forced to reconsider the frame as an organic rather than geometric form. You can of course make your viewfinder from a torn hole.
Torn hole viewfinder
Hundreds of years have elapsed since Durer made those images about drawings using frames and grids. At the time he was reporting on things he found on his journey to Italy, devices that he regarded as important new ideas as artists struggled to draw the world more and more accurately.
Durer
19th century Table de L'Aquarelliste (Watercolourist Table with sighting grid)
However these devices have now entered the lexicon of art itself and can become integral to the making of images.
Using a sighting glass: Ludovico Cigoli: 1610
Cigoli's image of an artist using a sighting glass could be a drawing for a performance, I like the fact that in this case the artist is the nude subject of the image, especially as it was made at a time when it was usually naked women that were subject to the male gaze.
Pia Linz
The artist Pia Linz has taken the idea of the drawing viewfinder and decided to build one that she can work inside. The small transparent room above is in effect a three-dimensional tracing frame. She sets these transparent acrylic objects up in places where she wants to draw and she marks her drawings onto the surface from the inside where she sits working. Afterwards the drawings are sharpened up and the objects exhibited as sculpture. The process now turning full circle, the capture device becoming far more important than the process of capturing the image.
Notes from a drawing conference (see notes on the work of Catherine Anyango, who was making drawn images of 'last seen' surveillance footage of people that were either found dead or went missing.
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