Drawing Skills: Measuring

Lesson 9

This lesson will deal with learning how to improve your drawing skills by creating a unit of measurement for drawing. You will use your pencil to measure and draw a still life which will be set up in front of you. In the first drawing by Honore Daumier you can see that the practice goes back many hundreds of years. People still use it, because it works.

All you have to do is hold a pencil or brush at arms length, close one eye, and move your thumb up or down the pencil to make a measurement. then compare that measurement to something else. Check out these two photos of me measuring distances between points on my guitar.

Here I measure from the bottom of the hole to where the neck meets the body.

I then keep my thumb in the same place on the pen, and compare my first measurement against the new one.  Now I can make a better estimate as to how wide I need to draw the guitar.  Judging from this photo it is about 1 and 1/3 pens wide at that point.  Now correlate these measurements onto the paper in front of you. Remember, you don’t have to draw it to the scale of your pen measurements. Once you’ve committed to the first initial marks on your drawing you have already created a measuring system.Your units can be whatever size you desire.

Drawing #16 – Measuring and drawing a corner of the room.

For this drawing I want you to draw a corner of the room while using this technique. Set aside one hour of time for this drawing and keep measuring and drawing until the hour expires.  Remember that it is important to get a base unit of  measurement first!