Drawing: the wonders and limitations of short cuts in image making

The British Museum has a room near the top of the North Stairs in which it displays temporary exhibitions of drawings and prints. One recent show was "In search of Classical Greece - travel drawings of Edward Dodwell and Simone Pomardi 1805–1806" which was a collection of topographic illustrations and large scale panoramas showing classical Greece, abandoned, raw and un-excavated as it was in the early 19th century. This was a time when Greece did not exist as a country as it had yet to fight its war of independence from the Ottoman Empire and Athens was barely more than a large village. Brian Sewell talks about the show here and gives a good overview of the two protagonists but I want to use it to draw some broader conclusions.

Traditionally most artists and certainly most painters would regard drawing as a discipline central to their practice. It allows a deeper understanding of one's subject than is otherwise practical and is a fast and low-cost way to develop and rehearse compositions, to clarify one's interests and to discover problems. By their very nature though humans like short cuts and a fundamental one with regards to drawing is the camera obscura. The principles of using a pinhole or a lens on one side of a darkened room to project an image onto the opposite side are truly ancient and the device became popular during the Renaissance as perspective and correct anatomy became important to artists. They would quite literally trace images off the wall. In due course portable versions were developed and Dodwell and Pomardi made extensive use of this technology on their tour in order to make drawings both more accurate and faster than would otherwise have been possible.

Standing before their drawings, as full of strengths and weaknesses as anybody else's, it is apparent that the limitations of the drawings have a lot to do with the very technology that made them. There are many passages that feel mechanical. There are passages where the lack of intellectual involvement has plainly led to boredom. There is one in particular, a village on a hillside, which is as if both artists' knowledge of perspective has gone for an afternoon nap. Walls of houses suddenly appear to be random shapes instead of rectangles distorted by perspective. On close examination it appears the drawing features multiple horizons. In some work that would not be a significant issue or might even a deliberate device, but for a topographic artist who is asking us to accept his work as being as accurate as humanly possible, this dramatically undermines trust in the rest of image. If the houses are demonstrably careless, why would one accept anything else is accurate? Time and again I was left wondering about the purpose of the drawings. The panels on the wall said they were primarily prep work for engravings which makes sense of them to a large extent but, had I been Dodwell's engraver working from the drawings at a later date, I would have cursed him.

Other drawings, less dependent on the camera obscura, were far more human, vibrant and considered. It is inescapable to me that when the pair relied on mechanically tracing their images, their work suffered. When they went back to engaging their brains - as in the pieces that were reworked into finished watercolours as this one has been - the human and lively qualities one would hope for from an artist returned.

Allow me to demonstrate the limitations with my own work. Here is a photograph which I have previously mentioned which is intended to become a drawing when time allows. Indeed the distortion and exaggeration I have applied means it has some of the characteristics of a drawing already. These are two intertwined oak trees in the woods above Runnymede and the intention is to explore their relationship. This photo would be useless for working from in isolation. It is just a confusing mess of branches and one can gain no useful insight from the photograph; one can see the complexity of their relationship but not the nature of it. Indeed, before I started working through the process outlined below, it was impossible to separate these trees from their neighbours just using the initial snaps. The insight that I have and the idea that that has led to has come from sketching and walking round the trees in the field.

This of course leads us to today's short cut of choice. We have moved from the camera obscura through the film camera and now to the digital camera. Suddenly time and resources are no barrier to image making. There is a danger that discrimination and consideration can take a back seat to gratuitous recording. To take a well worn phrase from another context, we are in an age of "shoot first and ask questions later" and there is a tendency that pictures become less about pro-active composition and more about retrospective editing. Over the next few years, there will be people leaving art school for whom Facebook, Twitter, Flickr et al have been a key aspect of their life for as long as they can remember. They are of a generation who have lived their formative years living in a digital kaleidoscope, snapshots of every aspect of their lives sparkling through the ether. For some of this generation, the concept of "enough pictures" does not exist. For some in this new culture, activity is mistaken for action and talking is mistaken for communication. People who live this way hold the tantalising promise of being able to present things in a new, infinitely fragmented way but they also risk never being aware of contemplation and the benefits it brings. With a digital camera it is too easy to shoot indiscriminately and return home with hundreds of pictures and no insight into those pictures at all.

Dodwell forewarns us of this danger in his method of composition. When choosing the locations for his panoramas he didn't look for beauty, charm or artistic value. He sought out the the spot from which he could see the most points of interest and then took it as he found it and, in doing so, the depiction of each point of interest was compromised by the need to depict the others. Panoramas were perhaps the first examples of composition by editing and of composition being compromised by too much information both in the image and for the artist to be able to handle with intelligence and discretion.

Perversely, the panoramic form doesn't just give us insight into the problems caused by mechanised image making and composition by editing; it also hints at the solutions. If the idea intrigues you, I suggest you download some image stitching software and with the instructions and with trial and error learn to take 360º panoramas. Don't just head to your local beauty spot and shoot the horizon but instead find somewhere more complex, with a foreground and a middle-ground as well as a background. Find a spot from where you would be able to take several attractive photos just by turning round. To get a panorama which is stitched in a truly seamless way the camera should be on manual focus and manual exposure. It should be focussed to the same distance all the way round and it should use the same exposure all the way round - this will help avoid visible joins between photos and will make the computer work far easier. The decision making process this forces begins to turn photography from being passive information gathering into active composition as you will need to interrogate your scene carefully. Having the correct exposure and focus for some areas will mean other areas are light, dark or soft. Choices need to be made. Small movements in location can have a significant effect on the final image. There is no longer room for a trigger happy approach, everything must be considered. In short, to create an image in this way forces you to observe closely and make choices and in so doing it bridges the gap between the nature of photography and one of the key purposes of drawing; it becomes rigourous and gives the photographer insight.

My own personal and ever developing solution to the strengths (speed and accuracy) and weaknesses (lack of involvement, untruthful colours and tonality) of the use of digital photography in the development of art is to use it in an iterative way. I go out, open minded, with my camera and I take pictures. I sometimes fall into the trap of being trigger happy but this way it is not so important. I review the pictures and let the germ of an idea grow, leaving it for days, weeks or months. When the idea begins to crystallise, I head back and take more pictures this time concentrating on the idea. On my return home, the pictures are again reviewed. Those that may translate into a painting are then thoroughly photoshopped  - I mess with contrast, exposure and colour balance to help me see the structure of the scene. I blur all the details out to see it simplified. I sketch from it to understand particular areas or shapes. I then go back to the scene again and, if necessary, re-shoot or sketch. At the very least I poke around until I have answers to questions the initial photoshopping raised. I then go back into Photoshop again, distorting, compositing and tweaking as required and this will be the basic composition I then work from in combination with drawings of passages which are either complex and confused in the photo or where I have changed them significantly.


In conclusion, mechanical, optical and digital processes are of huge value to an artist but come with enormous caveats attached. It is necessary to recognise the dangers that accompany their use, in particular the risk of lifeless, mechanical draughtsmanship and the potential elimination of all discrimination and invention within a composition. When an individual artist can find a workflow which allows him to exploit the efficiency of this type of information gathering whilst avoiding the pitfalls then it is a very good thing indeed.