Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

This exercise is a first step to learning how to tackle the unexpectedly overwhelming concept that is texture and detail. We'll start out by learning to study a reference image and to work past our all-too-human instinct to throw away critical visual information.

Then we'll explore applying what we've learned from our reference images as a tool - not bound by how it is presented and arranged in the reference, but in full control, using it to convey information exactly as is needed to get an idea across to our audience.

Remember that you should be doing this exercise with a fineliner/felt tip pen. If you're having trouble filling in the dark areas, a black brush pen can also be very useful.

Your page will be arranged into a very specific layout, as shown here. You'll have a number of rows, each row will be roughly 2.5 inches tall, starting with a square of that height and width on the left. The rest of the width of the page (I'm recommending 8.5x11 printer paper, you'll have to change the sizes around if you're working in paper of a different size) will be split into two rectangles more or less of equal size.

You are welcome to work with your page in landscape orientation (11" wide, 8.5" tall in this case) so you'll end up with 3 or so rows, though I'll leave that decision up to you.

Notice how the rectangle on the end there has a bit of a black bar on its left side - make sure you fill this in with solid black. It doesn't need to be too thick, just enough to be significant.

Each row is going to pertain to a different texture, and is going to require a different set of reference photos. You can use one, but it's better to use several photos of the same sort of thing, just to arm yourself with that much more visual information to draw from. Keep in mind that when we say texture, we're referring to a very specific thing.

Texture is the stuff that wraps around your major forms. Technically texture itself is made up of small forms, and the marks you see are all made up of the shadows cast by those forms (as mentioned in the pitfalls listed above), but they're at such a scale that they are not impacted by any sort of perspective distortion.

For example, "bricks" are not a texture. Bricks are at best, a pattern. The material of the bricks, however, with all their pocks and marks and grit, is certainly a texture. Similarly, "nose" is not a texture, but skin (complete with pores and hairs and zits and whatever else) is.

As you can see from this image, I've chosen a photograph of a lizard (an iguana? I don't know), and I'm going to be focusing on the texture of its scales.

The square on the left is to be filled in with the texture as you observe it, with all of its glorious detail, noise and density. Cram it all in there, don't try to imply any of it. Be explicit. This will take a long time, and it will be arduous. Worse still, if you decide in the future to tackle the texture challenge, you're going to be doing it 25 times, for 25 different textures. For now, you need only do one page, which should consist of 3 rows.

Remember, as I've mentioned twice now, the marks you're putting down are the shadows cast by the forms that make up the texture. Don't be afraid to expand them beyond lines, and fill in little areas of solid black.

The following rectangle is an easy one - just use it to write your notes and observations, all the things that you learned about that particular texture. Feel free to use words, little doodlesketches, whatever you like. Just don't write for the sake of writing, I hate seeing that. What you put down there should be of value to you, and should be something you can work with later on. One important thing to observe is how exactly the light plays off all the little forms in your texture. How much shadowplay do you see, and how does it manifest? Furthermore, taking notes on how the shapes and forms are arranged, grouped and clustered is also important.

This part is not to be done until you've done the last two steps for ALL ROWS ON YOUR PAGE. At this point, you should have gotten a decent amount of mileage purely observing and studying textures, now we get to learning how to organize it and use it for our own purposes.

The left side of the texture has a thick black bar on it. Imagine that the right side has an equally thick white bar, where no lines may be drawn. In between these two bars, I want you to use your texture to transition from black to white, left to right. On the left, start off very dense, and make use of solid black areas that bleed into your texture to help make the transition from the black bar seamless. As you move towards the right, decrease the density of your texture. In the case of these scales, you'll see that I stopped closing my scales off, and started letting them bleed into one another.

Mistake: Scribbling

This image is barely even necessary, but to put it simply - don't scribble. Don't rely on randomness or chaos. You may find a texture that feels like it's just a bunch of nonsense, crazy chaotic marks. It's not - it never is. There's always some sort of rhythm to them, a flow that they follow because that's how the physical world works. Even mussed up hair is going to flow in a particular fashion as the stands of hair group into shocks and clumps.

If you're about to scribble, stop and think. Go back to studying your reference, and look more closely.

Mistake: Drawing the forms of a texture

Textures are, as previously discussed, made up of little forms that exist along the surface of a larger one. Make sure you're not outlining and enclosing all of those forms however. Instead of drawing the forms themselves, you should be drawing the impact they have on their surroundings - that is, the shadows they cast.

Mistake: No transition from dense to sparse

The biggest challenge for those who are new to texture is breaking away from using lines to enclose and outline their textural forms.

It's important to realize that lines don't actually exist - they're a tool we employ, and they are very effective at demonstrating the borders between the volumes of our forms. They work very well when dealing with general construction, but once we get into situations where we have a lot of tiny forms that run along the surface of our major constructed forms, this tool becomes much less effective. It can quickly result in a lot of lines crammed close together, creating high contrast, visually noisy areas that turn into unintended focal points that draw the viewer's eye. Of course, we've discussed this previously - the solution is to rely on cast shadows instead.

This doesn't mean drawing in our textural forms with line first, then applying shadows. It means relying purely on shadows only, and allowing there to be edges that get lost and found throughout our texture. This happens because the shadows where two forms meet (like two scales coming together) will generally be much deeper, since light has more difficulty penetrating these crevasses. As the amount of light increases, the shadows on external edges will disappear much sooner than those in these deeper cracks, causing those edges to get "lost" and then be "found" once again.

This is extremely useful, because it allows us to punch gaps in our textures, providing a means to transition from densely packed areas of black ink, to areas that are mostly just left blank.

Additionally, using this approach allows us to imply a lot more information without actually having to draw it all. As we move further to the right side where the texture is left sparse, the viewer's brain will fill in most of the detail there. If instead we were to outline everything in its entirety, we'd be telling the viewer that every single piece of information that has been drawn exists, and that there is nothing that exists that has not been drawn. There is no room left for implied detail - everything is instead entirely explicit. That is an inflexible way of working, and should be avoided.