QUICK START

If you have persevered thru any of this, you might be wondering how you would start to do a transparent drawing. You might have an urge to find a piece of paper, a pencil, and something to make tones with. If you have this urge, then in one sense the mission of this website is achieved by getting just one more analogue drawing into the world.

Much of the drawings so far have been of existing buildings. Yet another equally important use of Transparent Drawing is for fantasy creation. You can use Transparent Drawing to draw an object that does not exist and instead comes from your imagination. While we will look at this fantasy drawing concept in much detail later, here is a quick start. And for those of you who are more highly graphically evolved, this may be too remedial. What follows is Transparent Drawing 101.

Many times, a Transparent Drawing can be a projection. What to we mean by projection? You take a very simple line drawing to start with. And then you simply draw vertical lines up from that.

So for example, draw a simple square on your paper more or less like the drawing on the left.  The square in question is shown by the darker lines on the left image.

Then draw vertical lines from the corners of your square, just like the image on the right.  These vertical lines are what we call projections.  You are projecting the corners of the object up.

After connecting the tops of the lines, what we have is a basic rectangular form that you can see all six sides of, just like the drawing on the right.  At this point, one might think they are done. You made a transparent analogue drawing of the object of interest.

Yet I find that some sort of tone is required to fully fix and understand the object in your memory and  imagination. As has been clear by now, I like watercolors. As we all know, watercolors have a natural transparency to them. When you apply a tone over another, you can still read both tones. This natural layering gives an automatic transparency to your drawing. While I am satisfied, at least at the moment, with the qualities that watercolor gives, there are of course other mediums and techniques which I will do my best to outline at a future time.

Then, all I do is simply add a transparent watercolor wash to a few of the sides, just like both drawings above. You can see that the left drawing just has a tone to one side of the rectangle.  And then the right drawing has a tone applied to the back of the form.

Don’t happen to have an expensive artist’s water color set? That’s ok as neither do I. Although you might find something in an old art supplies box that is hiding in a basement closet. Even a Prang watercolor set that is typically used in elementary art classes is perfectly fine.

The two drawings just above show a more or less complete transparent drawing.  If you look closely, you can see that only three sides have a tone applied.  The tone that runs up one side is over the tone on the back side.  Not every side or every plane has to have a tone.  And then sometimes it is fun to apply a background tone, like the drawing on the right.  It is also fun to keep some of the area of the drawing white.  This white tone helps to keep contrast and interest in the drawing.  It also lightens your workload.

We will cover the various media later. Whatever you use for toning, it does not matter. It could be magic marker. It could be charcoal. The point is that by giving some kind of tone to the sides of your rectangular form, you are beginning to communicate, and therefore understand, opacity and mass for a complete object.