Against templates

Sam

Chief Administrator & Benevolent Dictator
Staff member
Joined
Nov 6, 2006
Messages
10,489
Location
Covington, Louisiana
I have become acquainted with a very good painter and one of the best drawers I know. He does a lot of portrait commissions. The first half hour of studio time is spent honing his drawing skills. You might find his practice method interesting and useful. He draws on tracing paper- the more transparent the better. You might even try acetate. He works primarily with the human form and chooses a photo or drawing then tries to copy it as perfectly as he is able. He does not use calipers or any other measuring device forcing his eye and mind to be trained in seeing and evaluating relationships. When he is done he places the drawing over the picture to see how well he has done. It's challenging and an exercise I am going to start doing. He works with people but I don't see any reason why you couldn't enlarge scroll or ornaments and then draw them.

I like to draw and my approach to engraving is very similar to Theirrys. I also understand that for some it is a hobby and templates can have a place as has been well explained. Many of my students have a good day job that they enjoy and simply want something to do in the evenings and weekends that doesn't require them to deal with people or a computer screen.

I like your artist friend's idea of the tracing paper to test accuracy, Lee. I'm going to give that a try. The majority of my daily drawing is simply eyeball-and-draw with no measuring aids. I find this forces me to find those relationships I would overlook otherwise. I can achieve around 95%+ accuracy but if it's something really critical I'll take a measurement. I don't use grids but they're quite effective. Here's Durer's projection grid.

durer_grid.jpg
 

Mike Fennell

Elite Cafe Member
Joined
Apr 6, 2007
Messages
660
Location
Matteson, a south suburb of Chicago.
Years ago I drew a Durer grid on a piece of acetate and taped it to the bill of my fishing hat to help me to quickly lay out on my sketchpad the relationships between trees, hills and buildings in outdoor scenes on location. I have never seen anyone else use the grid that way, but it is likely that any idea I have had has probably also occurred to someone else, somewhere, sometime.

Grids, templates and transfers are tools, just as pencils, erasers and gravers are tools. Use whatever tool that helps you achieve your vision. A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for? Robert Browning, "Andrea del Sarto". Keep reaching.

The scroll templates that are commercially available could be used to speed up your first sketches when you want to quickly try several ideas for a scene, but I don't use them because the proportions are wrong. They are somewhere between Phi and parallel backbones, and they spiral in too quickly to allow proper proportion of leaf size. They are fine to quickly draw various sized scrolls on practice plates for practice in scroll cutting, but really not of much use in laying out a scene. If you use them, you will find that you will need to redraw all the scrolls after you have finished the scene.

Drawing the scroll by hand takes only a few seconds more than drawing it with a template, and the scroll you draw by eyeball will be the right size and have the correct spacing for your leaves and tendrils. Some like to layout the backbone by a series of dots first, then connect the dots. Some start at point of origin and draw to the center. Some start at the center and work out to the border. Some start at point of origin, and when halfway into the scroll, jump to the center and work back out to the first half. I like to sketch the scroll lightly in one stroke, repeat several times and look for a consensus and flow in those several lines. Use whatever works for you, but continue to try every new technique that you come across.
 

Lane

Member
Joined
Sep 11, 2007
Messages
24
Location
Oklahoma
If someone knows how to design and draw out every detail I see nothing wrong with using templates to speed things up. It is no different than copying side a to side b, cylinder chamber 1 to chamber 2, panel 1 to panel 2. Did Nimschke use templates? If so, was he wrong?

Buying a full out revolver template, is different than a scroll spine template, that you are allowed to use is no different than factory engraving, in that you are using someone else's design with permission. Are factory engravers wrong? I realize that there are "factory" engravers engrave their own design, I am not talking about them here.

I believe that given enough time, template users will learn how to draw. You are going through the motions.

I don't own any templates, and I can't draw. :)
 
Last edited:

monk

Moderator
Staff member
::::Pledge Member::::
Joined
Feb 11, 2007
Messages
10,857
Location
washington, pa
lee brought up a valuable (to me) resource or aid; toys rus and other outlets sell very cheap opaque projectors. i used to do a paper drawing, then put the drawing on a wall maybe 2-3 feet across.a beginner may unknowingly get bored looking at those little drawings. make them wall-size, you'll immediately see bad spots where none existed when drawn to size. just another way to reduce the time needed to skin the cat ! eventually, i bought a more expensive artograph brand projector that enlarged or reduced. aint used it for a long time, it's just gathering dust. ;)
 

Latest posts

Sponsors

Top