The Natural Way to Draw Kimon Nicolaides Drawing

The Natural Way to Draw Kimon Nicolaides

Drawing starts with the impulse, not the position.

Honre Daumier

• You should draw not with the thing looks like, not even what it is, but what it is doing. Suppose the model take the pose of a fighter with fists clenched and jaw thrust forward angrily. Try to draw the actual thrust of the jaw, the clenching of the hand. A drawing of prize fighters should show the push from foot to fist, the force behind their blows.

As the pencil roams, it will sometimes strike the edge of an object. But more often it will travel through the center of the object and even outside of the object. Do not hinder it, let it move on it’s own. Above all else, do not try to follow edges. The drawing may be meaningless to a person who looks at it, or to yourself after you’ve forgotten what you were drawing. There may be nothing in it to suggest the shape of the object, or the object will be somewhat apparent, that does not matter. It is only the action, the gesture, that you are trying to respond to here, not the details and the structure. Gesture has no precise edges, no exact shape, no jelled form.

Like contour, gesture is closely related to the tactile experience. In contour drawing, you feel that you are touching the edge of form with your pencil. In gesture drawing, you feel the movement of the whole object in your whole body. Try to feel what you are looking at in your body. Think of your gesture like a scribble. Scribble, rather than writing or printing carefully, as if you were trying to write very fast and thinking more of the meaning than the way the thing looks, paying no attention to spelling, puncuation, or grammar.

Gesture is intangible. It cannot be understood without feeling it, and need not be exactly the same thing for you as for someone else. To discover it there is required only practice and awareness on your part. You learn about it more from drawing than anything I can say.