Drawing by Feeling

So what is empty-headed drawing? When I decided to take up drawing seriously in my mid-20s, I dove head-first into Kimon Nicolaides classic, The Natural Way to Draw. This book led me through a rigid, daily discipline of approximately three hours of drawing exercises. These exercises proved to be invaluable in teaching me to see and draw shape and form in a very tactile manner. With Kimon’s method, you are supposed to make your best attempt to feel the outline and form by imagining that your pencil is touching the edge of the subject. Other exercises ask you to imagine you are sculpting the form of the subject with your pencil. That exercise really resonated with me and I spent hours “sculpting” everything I could from trees to the human form. I later learned this was the tactile approach to drawing, as defined by master artist and teacher Ted Seth Jacobs.

The Limitations of Touch

I never completely finished Kimon’s book. And while it still sits on my bookshelf periodically inspiring feelings of nostalgia, I got far enough through it to solidify my drawing skills. However, as more and more subjects entered the pages of my sketch journal, I realized there was a serious limitation to the tactile approach. Tactile by its very nature involves the sense of touch, but if there is no form to touch, the tactile approach loses its benefit. And there is one primary element that we see all the time that has absolutely no visible form, and that element is light.

Drawing by Seeing

Thankfully, there is another approach to drawing that solves this dilemma, and that is the optical approach. To put it simply, while the tactile approach implies drawing how something feels, the optical approach implies drawing how something looks. The first is more intellectual, the second is strictly visible.

To demonstrate, let’s say you are drawing a face in a dark room that is intensely lit from one side. In this scene, the light side of the face is visible, while the dark side is barely visible. A strict tactile approach would require you to indicate the outline of the entire face, even the barely visible shadow side; the fact that one side of the face is in light and the other in dark is secondary, if not disregarded. A strict optical approach would de-emphasize the outlines of the form and focus merely on capturing the light and dark abstract shapes, which when assembled correctly on paper, look like the face you are drawing.

Empty Headed Drawing: The Optical Approach

You could almost say that the tactile approach is more intellectual and requires the artist to draw what he or she knows about the face, while the optical approach only requires the artist to draw what he or she sees and nothing more. In a way, the optical approach requires one to suspend their knowledge of things and their prejudice of what they think they know about them and see and draw only abstract shapes. I dare say the optical approach is empty-headed drawing. By using this term, I don’t mean to imply that the artist who uses the optical approach lacks in intellectual capability, only that it requires one to not think intellectually about the subject they are drawing. They must merely see, and draw what they see, nothing more.

You Are Seeing Shapes

Admittedly, many artists use a combination of both the tactile and optical approach when drawing. I believe this is because the pencil, unlike the brush, makes thin, precise lines. Therefore, many artists tend toward outlining form and afterwards imply light and shadow through various means of shading. Neither this, nor a strict tactile approach is inferior by any means. A well-drawn contour line contains a delicate, lyrical form of expressive beauty that cannot be replicated by mere shapes of light and dark. But despite all its beauty and expression, it is ultimately not how the eye sees reality. When you look at an object, you are not seeing an outline, rather a shape that meets another shape, even if that shape is empty space. The edge where one shape meets another shape may be expressed with a line, but it may also be expressed with shapes of light and dark, which is the essence of the optical approach.

Which Approach is Best?

So, does it matter which approach I take, or what degree of the two approaches I implement? In the matter of art and self-expression, neither approach is superior to the other. However, representational art consists almost entirely how you look at things and interpret them. And having a better understanding of how you are viewing reality will give you better chance at expressing it. The great thing about the optical approach is that you don’t need to attempt to draw something you can barely see, and you can also draw things that don’t have defined borders, such as atmosphere. But most importantly, you don’t need to be a scientific expert on what you are drawing, you only need to draw the abstract shapes of light and dark in front of you. You don’t need to draw a hand, but the lights and darks that when assembled correctly look like a hand. And this can give the artist a tremendous sense of freedom.

We will talk more next time on the practical applications of these two approaches. Till next time, keep drawing.

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out Drawing Without Boundaries. To see my artwork, visit www.JasonTako.com and visit my YouTube channel.

Jason Tako is a nationally known fine artist who specializes in western, wildlife, plein air, and Historical Native American subject matter. He spent his learning years sketching the wetlands and wooded areas of rural Minnesota. He has been featured in Plein Air Magazine and Western Art Collector Magazine and he was the Featured Artist for the 2020 Southeastern Wildlife Expo. See his work at www.JasonTako.com and his demonstrations on his YouTube Channel.