Storyboard for the dream sequence of Hitchcock’s Spellbound, in the Harry Ransom Center.
Tag: drawing (page 1 of 2)
Study of a Kingfisher, with dominant Reference to Colour, by John Ruskin
David Hockey, from A Rake’s Progress (1963)
The Castelbarco Tomb, Verona, by John Wharlton Bunney
Grayson Perry, detail from Print for a Politician (click to see larger image)
Antonio Stradivari, the ‘Davidoff’ cello (1712)
Ruskin’s instructions to his students:
Suppose you have to paint the Narcissus of the Alps. First, you must outline its six petals, its central cup, and its bulbed stalk, accurately, in the position you desire. Then you must paint the cup of the yellow which is its yellow, and the stalk of the green which is its green, and the white petals of creamy white, not milky white. Lastly, you must modify these colours so as to make the cup look hollow and the petals bent; but, whatever shade you add must never destroy the impression, which is the first a child would receive from the flower, of its being a yellow, white and green thing, with scarcely any shade in it. And I wish you for some time to aim exclusively at getting the power of seeing every object as a coloured space. Thus for instance, I am sitting, as I write, opposite the fireplace of the old room which I have written much in, and in which, as it chances, after this is finished, I shall write no more. Its worn paper is pale green; the chimney-piece is of white marble; the poker is gray; the grate black; the footstool beside the fender of a deep green. A chair stands in front of it, of brown mahogany, and above that is Turner’s Lake of Geneva, mostly blue. Now these pale green, deep green, white, black, gray, brown and blue spaces, are all just as distinct as the pattern on an inlaid Florentine table. I want you to see everything first so, and represent it so. The shading is quite a subsequent and secondary business. If you never shaded at all, but could outline perfectly, and paint things of their real colours, you would be able to convey a great deal of precious knowledge to any one looking at your drawing; but, with false outline and colour, the finest shading is of no use.
“The Wood of Error,” from Robert Rauschenberg’s drawings of Dante’s Inferno
In Huxtable’s biography of Wright she often comments on the beauty and precision of his pencil sketches: all his professional life he started his days by sharpening, with a knife, his colored pencils. These are from Time.
Imagined reconstruction of old London Bridge; pencil drawing by Paul Stroud
A Plan for the Borough of Clinton (never to be built), Harvard University Libraries; via John Overholt on Twitter.
John Ruskin, 65 Casa Contarini Fasan, Venice (1841). Ashmolean.
from “The Critic’s Art”; “Windows of the Fifth Order,” drawing by John Ruskin from his Modern Painters
Drawing from a Photograph of Part of Santa Maria della Spina, Pisa, John Ruskin
John Ruskin, Decoration by Disks: Palazzo dei Badoari Partecipazzi, 1851, Vol. 1 of The Stones of Venice; from an exhibition at the University of Mary Washington
Designs for Truro Cathedral, 1878 Artist: William Burges. Image Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London — from a post on The Computer vs. the Hand in Architectural Drawing.
momalibrary: Subtle cover design alert: the skyline appears to be printed to show through the unbleached muslin binding, resulting in an atmospheric image. The interior is equally elegant, featuring traditional page layout and typography. Henry Holmes Smith. The Chicago Landscapes of Art Sinsabaugh: A History of the Photographer (self-published, 1976).