Instruction

Finished paintings hide their own history. By the time a picture reaches a museum wall, the false starts, the rejected compositions and the figures that moved three times have been painted over. Sketchbooks and preparatory studies are where you can still see the thinking. This lesson looks at three artists whose studies survive, because the habit you build this week, using a sketchbook to decide rather than to decorate, is the habit that separates advanced work from competent work.

Caillebotte plans a street. Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877, Art Institute of Chicago) is a large painting of a Paris intersection. Before he painted it he made drawings such as the graphite Study for Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877, Art Institute of Chicago) to work out the perspective of the buildings and the place of the figures. The Art Institute also holds one of his sketchbooks (1883-1887), with drawings in graphite and watercolor. Open the finished painting and find the green lamppost. It divides the picture almost exactly in two. That is a decision, not an accident, and studies are where decisions like it get tested.

Seurat builds with value. Georges Seurat made dozens of studies for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884 (1884-86, Art Institute of Chicago). One is Seated Woman with a Parasol (1884/85), in black Conté crayon. Notice that it has almost no outlines. Seurat drew the figure as a shape of dark against light, letting the texture of the paper break up the crayon. In the painting that figure is built from small touches of color, but its silhouette was already fixed in the drawing. The study tested one question: does this shape read clearly against its background?

Hokusai’s model books. Katsushika Hokusai issued his sketches as printed books, the Hokusai manga (Art Institute of Chicago, which dates its set 1812/78), which appeared in many volumes over several decades. They are pages of people working, animals, plants, waves and faces, printed as woodblock books that other artists and students used as model books. They show a different use of the sketchbook: collecting forms from the world so they are ready when a composition needs them.

Three uses of a sketchbook. From these examples you can name three purposes. The first is collecting: drawing from observation to store forms, as Hokusai did. The second is testing: a small study that answers one question, as Seurat’s did. The third is planning: working out the structure of a composition before the final, as Caillebotte’s perspective study did. Your sketchbook this year should do all three, and every entry should say which one it is doing.

Setting up the book. Number the pages. Keep the first page as an index you update weekly. Date every entry. Write on the page: a short note in the margin saying what you were testing and what you learned is worth more than a polished drawing with no thinking attached. John Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing (1857), written as letters to beginners, argues that drawing trains you to see what is actually in front of you rather than what you assume is there. That is the purpose of the observation pages you start today.

Alternatives. If a physical sketchbook is not practical for you, a folder of dated loose sheets or a digital sketchbook in the free app Krita meets the same requirements, as long as entries are dated and annotated.

Formative check

Work through these before moving on. They are not graded — they tell you, and your teacher, whether the standard below has landed yet.