Lesson 9 | Can the sketch stand up to things?

Hello and happy sketching.

This time we are not going to sketch, but we are going to prove if our sketch can prove itself in the layout with other things. That’s why we are going to do a layout with some items that we have on our drawing tables. I have here some ink, a booklet, and my aquarelle paint box, some utensils to draw and a scissor. I want to make a layout. And what does it mean to do a layout

Okay, I take all the stuff away. My stage is the table. I want to find out which one of those sketches is better, the first one or the second one. And that’s why I arranged them in a context as if they would be a part of a book. So what is the main thing when you do a layout in a book or in a newspaper? You have a grid. Whatever you do, you have a grid. Meaning a grid has horizontal lines like floors that hold a building and you have columns like houses that hold the structure of a house. So wherever you put your stuff here is my camel. It’s not looking to this side because yeah, it could be so in this direction it would like to look to the coming. But I would like him to orient to the sketches. That’s why I’m putting him here. Or even a part more to the left here. And then I have the two pictures. I’d like to have them more something that looks similar, I have a Copic marker to shade my drawings. But actually, I want to put it together with the crayon, something that has not that much contrast to the background. What can I do with my scissors or with my paint box? I put it here, this paint box. It’s leaping out of the structure. But this doesn’t matter because this is the part that is not that important. I’m putting the scissors here. So this is oriented to the right as well. Maybe I can put this down. I align all the stuff. I lean all the stuff to the grid so that it goes here. That is an imaginary line. But since we do all the stuff into the grid, we should put other stuff out of the grid. So I can even amount things. Or shall I put it like this? So here I have a column that goes through, but not totally, but it goes through. Here I have a column as well. But actually what I think is very important to know is that you do not have to apply the rule of using a grid totally. So you can always 5% go out of the grid and then it looks even nicer. Now I have the problem that I have almost nothing in the middle. How can I solve this problem? I need something with a little bit of contrast. I could put it here. Something like this? Yeah, why not? Maybe this wasn’t a good idea to put it here maybe it would be nicer to have it open without anything going to the border on the right side. Yeah, that’s something like this. So when I have arranged all the stuff that I have the feeling afterward it’s settled on this background, then I have something that we can call a layout that is working for our stuff.

And now is the questions. When I have all put it together in my layout, which one of the drawings is the better one? What do you think? Yeah, it’s all about contrast so here you have more contrast, you have a thicker line, more black on the line then it’s even better and I do know something … I enhance the contrast again and you see it’s even more compelling. I do a similar thing here but actually, you can easily find out this doesn’t work because the lines are too faint we lose the picture of a cat.

Speaker 1 (06:41)
How can we solve this? That’s not so easy. We can take more black, same lines, same lines because the lines are not a problem but the darkness of the lines is the problem. I just pronounce the lines a little bit more and here you see what happens, now it’s easier to detect than it is a cat and now it works better. So what we can learn from this is that we have really to apply contrast and then our drawings speak the concise language and this is what we want in our drawings. Try out making the same thing. Put them to some layout stuff, whatever you have on your desk and step one meter back and look at it and tell yourself which line is the best for a good appearance in layouting. Happy sketching.