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Tag: angle drawing

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Monday Morning Art School: angle drawing

Slightly more obtuse than 90°, almost exactly 90°, more acute than 90°. It’s far easier to see when you can compare it to accurate reference (and no, you don’t have to know those terms).

During last week’s workshop, Beth, Sharon and I were looking at a house on Pearl Street in Camden. I’d given them a lesson on two-point perspective and then said, “That’s just so you understand the principle. In real life, you’re going to measure angles rather than draw to a vanishing point.” That’s harder to do, because angle drawing takes practice. However, all drawing rests on angles and measurement.

“That gable end looks like it’s at a 90° angle,” Sharon said. Beth and I immediately disagreed. Of course we were roughly twenty feet away from her, so what we were seeing wasn’t what she was seeing. I heaved myself up (it was a hot day) and looked at what she was doing. She was holding an L-shaped composition finder up to the sky. Immediately I grasped an important new idea.

The angles that matter, very roughly, because it’s hot as a pistol in my driveway.

If you hold something that you know to be a right angle up to the angle you’re measuring, you can see how it deviates.

We’re all carrying around something that’s got a right angle: our sketchbooks. Failing that, we always have our cell phones.

Sharon’s view was, in fact, exactly 90°, but the idea was also useful to Beth and me. From our location, the angle formed by the gable end was about 10° flatter than Sharon’s view. I experimented holding my sketchbook up to various angles in the landscape and was pleased at how easily I could see angles.

(By the way, a roof where the gable end is at 90° looking straight-on would be a 12/12 pitch, which is pretty steep. Most of the time, when you see a 90° angle, it’s because you’re looking at it from off to one side.)

What if it’s so far off 90° that it’s hard to make a comparison?

I was on a roll, so I estimated other angles using Sharon’s idea. That was fine until I was so far off 90° that making a comparison no longer worked.

Drawing a hashmark parallel to the top and bottom of the fence was easy. Taking a photograph of those marks was hard.

What if I held my sketchbook level with the ground and marked that angle as a hash mark in the corner, I asked myself. Then I can easily translate that line into a parallel one where it belongs in my sketch. And, yes, that worked too.

My neighbor’s fence. Three minutes, tops, because I was standing along Route 1.

Angle drawing is important

Angles are critical to representing perspective. They also create the illusion of depth and space. Being able to sight-draw them allows us to draw objects from different viewpoints.

But, wait, there’s more. Angle drawing is important for:

Measurement: it’s often easier to see spatial relationships through angles than with the thumb-and-pencil method of drawing. (Fast, loose  painting rests on a base of good drawing. If you haven’t been taught to measure with a pencil, start here, here and here.)

Anatomy: Angles are essential for capturing the relationships between different parts of the body. This is particularly important in drawing limbs, posture and facial features.

Shading: Angles influence how light falls on an object and how shadows are cast.

Dynamism: Angles contribute to a sense of movement and energy in a drawing.

Foreshortening: You can’t foreshorten an object if you can’t see the angles, period.

That means any trick that makes angle drawing easier, I’m going to use, and I hope you do, too. Thank you, Sharon.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025: