Frank J.Lohan

I glue a small piece of sandpaper in the cover of a small box, and also glue a piece of paper towel there. This keeps the graphite dust in the box and off my drawing, and gives me a towel to wipe the lead on each time I sharpen it.

Pencil allows rapid tonal treatment of masses; a few broad strokes define the mass, with a sharp line or two to suggest the edge of the form. Light areas are often simply left untouched by the pencil.

A loose pencil sketch of the same chickadee. The form and mass are captured quickly with little attention to detail.

On an 8½“ by 11” piece of clear acetate, ink-rule a grid of horizontal and vertical lines every one-half inch. Place this grid over whatever you want to enlarge or reduce, and on composition paper draw a second grid of squares so that you have, at the size you want your final sketch, the same number of vertical and horizontal lines that cover your subject.

To copy, just note where the composition drawing lines cross the vertical and horizontal lines on the acetate grid, make corresponding marks on your composition paper grid, then connect the marks, noting how the line is supposed to flow through each particular square.

There are two things to remember:

The horizon is at eye level
The vanishing point lies on the horizon

see the horizon at your eye level. The illusion of a high point of view or a low point of view comes only from observing where things lie in relation to the horizon. If you are up high, things tend to be lower in relation to the horizon; if you are down low, things will appear high relative to the horizon.

clarifies why the poles seem to get shorter with distance—it is because the angle to the artist’s eye is smaller if they are farther away.

The big difference this time is that the horizon would cross the telephone poles near the bottoms.

In this illustration the tops of the telephone poles are at his eye level, and since the horizon is also at his eye level, the tops of the poles appear to touch the horizon (). In this case everything is below the horizon and the horizon itself is moved upward in the frame.