Drawing Space (rooms, not planets)

Royal Drawing School Adventures pt. 2

Another month has passed and daffodils have started poking their heads up in my garden. I have been busier than ever, starting work on an exciting non-fiction illustration project, which will take me through the rest of this year. I can’t say more as I’m sworn to secrecy, but I look forward to telling you all about it when the time comes!

Meanwhile I am here to share the second instalment of my experiences last Autumn at the Royal Drawing School. Last month I talked about the National Gallery class; this month is about Drawing Space.

I took this class as a kind of medicine for myself because I wanted to finally get around to learning perspective. It was not taught at my art school, and any time I’d attempted to teach myself using books, it always felt so dry that I’d give up.

I actually really like seeing space flattened or distorted in illustrations - but I wanted to make sure that I was making that a deliberate choice in my work, not one owing to a missing skill.

Two illustrators I admire and their different approaches to space:

Miroslav Šašek will draw flat scenes but is also perfectly at home with traditional perspective and uses it to great effect. Beatrice Alemagna bends and breaks the “rules” and it’s totally charming.

The lessons took place with two different tutors, in the Natural History Museum and the V&A on alternating weeks: two daunting but incredibly inspiring settings. Martin was more focussed on perspective whilst Jeanette taught us different ways of approaching space more playfully.

I was mentally preparing to bring along an assortment of rulers, protractors, compasses and other torture measuring instruments, but all that was required of us was a piece of string for checking the angles which we drew freehand.

In fact, Martin taught us some cool geometry tricks which actually help you do away with measuring. For example, how to duplicate a rectangle by finding its diagonal and repeating it parallel to the original shape:

You can see I’ve used that trick a bit here.

I have to admit that most of the drawings I made during Martin’s sessions are not much to look at - they are really just workings out and I can tell you that my brain was whirring at full capacity trying to keep up!

Nor do I think I “mastered” perspective in that 10 weeks - far from it - but it was very valuable to me; it definitely improved my understanding and made it feel much less daunting. I noticed that I was more adventurous when out sketchbooking, daring to draw whole interior scenes and not just focus on small areas or objects.

Some London café scenes spurred on by what I was learning in class

Jeanette’s classes were completely different and she had us play with materials and mark making, which of course I loved and felt much more at home with. She encouraged us to think about drawing different parts of the image in different ways; hyper-focusing on certain areas and lightly suggesting others; allowing our gaze and interest to dictate which information to bring out.

The drawing on the right was guided by instructions such as “draw something that goes to the top of the page… now draw something touching that… now spend 3 minutes including as much information as possible on one object… now draw something behind that quickly…”

In a particularly memorable exercise, she took us on a world tour through the various rooms of the V&A, and in each room we had an instruction and a few minutes to follow it: “find a pattern to include in your drawing… draw a head… change materials, draw one object but make it overlap the last drawing… draw something big!” etc. It was fun to relinquish control and end up with surprise associations.

As you can imagine, everyone’s drawing turned out completely different! It was nice to see what we had each been drawn to with no time to overthink it.

Playing with materials to create depth and draw the eye to certain features.

I hope you enjoyed this peek into my time at the Royal Drawing School. In the next and final instalment of this little series, I’ll tell you about my favourite of the three classes I took, Enduring Images.

Meanwhile, I hope you keep well and enjoy the spring flowers!