Little is really available in books or online about advanced drawing techniques. There's too much written about beginning drawing techniques.

One is to assume that once you get, "The Basics", you're left on your own since it's a, "Personal Choice" on how to do things. Fair enough. I won't contest that, since it's very cuddly and true.

A lot of my art time recently has been with just purely drawing: it's cheap, it's flexible and you don't need anything but something to draw on and something to draw with - both of which are abundant if you just look carefully.

My favorite tools to draw right now has been a black pen on white paper and using a contour shade technique. I don't find it easy to work with - the technique to me is hard and I don't find it very fast to work with: my last drawing took weeks. Half of this time was spent making the pencil drawing I'll later transfer to the final paper i'll be doing the drawing on. And that's fine. Sometimes I'm just anal about some thing's proportion being almost exactly like my source material - not similar: exactly.

So it takes a little time.

The other half of the time is practicing with copies of the drawing and trying to make my contour shading look, "Good".

What's contour shading? As far as I can grasp ('member: not much out there on this subject - it's not like I'm trying to find information on php's, crypt function or something), contour shading is drawing lines to create shade that somewhat reflect the contours of the thing you're drawing.

For example, an outline is a contour drawing - you're drawing the outline of the thing. That's easy to grasp. You can shade in the same way, but instead of drawing the outline, you draw a line as if you're drawing on the surface of the thing you're drawing on.

Makes sense?

This is different than crosshatching - although they're related, since in crosshatching, the name of the game is to create value (and this is usually used for shadow) by making simple patterns - x's and stuff. For example:

You do this with contour shading as well, although the lines you put down also give you hints at the three dimensional shape of the object, more than just value changes.

The problem I have with contour shading, since I must know the why of things, is at what angle do you draw these lines, in relationship of what you're drawing? For example: if I want to draw a square in my sketchbook, do I draw lines to produce shade that are vertical, horizontal, at a 45 degree angle - what?

The answer is, I can do whatever I want: I can do a combination of the two, or three, or whatever.

Now, say I want to draw something spherical, like an egg. Do I draw lines that follow the contours of the egg that are parallel to the longest side of the egg, or do I draw lines that are parallel slimmest side of the egg - or both?

If you do both, what you get is something that looks like it was made out of a very old school computer 3d modeling program - which is fine, if that's the boat that floats for you.

But.

It's sort of boring looking.

Look at this:

This is a contour shaded drawing in pen of a bunch of women without limbs. Not getting into that part... but look at the right breast of the figure to our upper left:

That breast looks awesome. The contour shading has two sets of lines: one that is the typography elevation of, the boob - ie: every .5 centimeter (or - whatever) of "elevation", there's another line drawn.

The other set of lines curve, say, starting from the nipple down and to the left. But these lines aren't parallel to each other.

How did the artist decide that's the lines to use?

It drives me crazy.

One idea: They Guessed.

They drew and drew and drew and drew and they liked how this looks, after many years of practice.

This idea is basically what I've thought: I don't like it when my lines on spherical things make little boxes on the surface of the thing I'm drawing, I'll mix it up.

That's great and all, but in practice - it's very hard to get these lines to look really really good: the chances that you're screw up the effect you're creating with the contour lines is great.

Again, it might have been just practice to get this illusion, but I had to see if it was something else.

Idea #2 - There Was a System

The illustration above is dated between 1548 and 1628. A little after the Renaissance, but the technique we're looking at is the technology from it: Chiaroscuro lighting, well proportioned women with nice tummies - it's all there.

The Renaissance is when artists in the West finally figured out Perspective. It's when giant domes were put on buildings - it was about Geometry.

So, when I look at a contour drawing and I see all these very fancy lines go everywhere and give this great affect of mass - I'm thinking, they're going to be using some sort of geometry, including here. There has to be a simple formula to what they're using.

So, searching for clues, I tried to infer things about this particular drawing- if you look at the drawing, the technique looks pretty much the same everywhere; the drawing has what you'd call in a art school critique, "oneness" or something like that - meaning - they didn't draw one woman using a paintbrush and another with a piece of charcoal.

So breasts are complex things... I'm not even going to go too into that, but the shape of one is complex as well, especially if you compare to my example of a flat square.

A simpler part of the drawing is the lower left corner of just the ground:

Here, you can plainly see that the contour shading is made up of one group of parallel lines, and another group of lines at a 45 degree (or so) angle that are also parallel to themselves. This was a special find, since the plane these lines are depicting is much simpler than the rest of the drawing concerning parts of the human bodies.

This same pattern of lines is used for the rest of the drawing

And that's the cracked code - That's. It.

Why do I like this pattern so much? I don't know - I think it's just pleasing to me - you could use any other combination of lines and you could make a drawing like this, but those two lines have a simplicity and utility to them that you really have a hard time questioning. The next problem is, how do you transfer this seemingly simple pattern of contour shading, not on a flat plane, but on a curved object, like a breast?

Something like this is easy for a computer but I don't want to calculate every single line I draw, every time I want to draw it.

Hmm.

So, I got a cylindrical object - I think it's my roommate's night stick - the kind you hit people with, in the night and I wrapped tape on it in two different patterns. I can understand contour shading to be like if I drew lines on the surface of the thing I'm drawing, and then drew those lines on paper -

One of the patterns is a group of parallel lines:

This is the pattern I find a bit boring.

The other side of the stick, I wrapped the tape in a spiral (hmm! spiral...) around the stick - once clockwise and once, counterclockwise:

Which made a pattern that seems so much more appealing to me.

The problem still is - how do I now draw these lines? If you look carefully, the lines created by the white tape make sort of an, "S" curve - it's not just lines going diagonally.

So - let's step back and simplified my complex shape: a cylinder, with something simple: my square.

If it wasn't for the third dimension, the lattice pattern I made would be nothing but lines drawn at 45 and 315 (?) degrees:

If you print this pattern out and wrap it around something cylindrical, you'll get a similar pattern. That's sort of interesting.

Now step back - if you print out the pattern of perpendicular lines:

and wrap it around something cylindrical, you'll also get a similar pattern from my first photograph of the night stick.

And - well, what's a way of making the 45 degree lattice pattern? Draw out a grid and connect the points where the original lines intersect:

And, that's all there is to making this interesting contour shading pattern and it works for whatever your surface is: curved, straight, cone, sphere - whatever.

The breast is interesting to apply this technique to- as is all curved surfaces, since instead of working on a flat plane, you're working on something that curves around itself. Once you learn the above trick, this is also easy to understand. The bit you have to realize is your grid is also curved and distorted, but making lines that intersect at a 45 angle of squares drawn on the grid still applies:

The pattern created is a beautiful one and even though the pattern above doesn't attempt at a three-dimensional illusion, depth seems almost to be created. One only has to distort this grid slightly to make a more volume-making shape.

Usually, when the words, "Beauty" and "Pattern", or, "Geometry" are in the same sentence, which is itself about Art, especially Old Master-type Art, especially when we're making spirals, one has a hard time not thinking of our friend the Golden Ratio:

In the above sketch, the black line is the line created by drawing the intersecting line between the grid points, which are curved around a circular path, instead of Cartesian. The Green is the Golden Spiral, which is itself made from the Golden Ratio.

Notice that at one point, they seem to be the same, but as far as my simple drawing goes, they're not.

By doing about 5 seconds of research, I found this diagram:

Which is exactly - exactly what I stumbled upon, trying to find a beautiful way of making contour lines.

That seemed pretty wild.

Now - the above diagram, as shown by my sketch isn't the Golden Ratio, it's something called the, "Logarithmic Spiral", or "Spira mirabilis"

This spiral, and Not the golden ratio is the spiral you see in Nature everywhere, including galaxies, sunflowers, nautilus shells, etc.

Funny that this spiral was also used in contour shading in pen and ink.

So the unknown question is: did someone figure out that the Logarithmic Spiral is nothing but a lines drawn at a 45 degree angle on a grid wrapped around a sphere and then thought, "Hey, I bet this would be killer for my drawing",

Or, did the above trial and errors happened, and someone just connected, (heh.) the lines? Or has anybody ever connected the lines?

Before?

I mean, it could all be coincidence...

Notes:

One thing to note is this technique does not create perspective - in fact, perspective isn't even touched here. If we wanted to do something like that, we'd be concerned on the distance between our gridded objects. In this case, we're not. The lines we're drawing are for the most part only there to create value for shading. If you have say, a point like a nipple that has a lot of lines converging and you want the nipple to have a lighter value, you're going to have to draw less lines. This system is not a system to create perspective, but it can help create depth. Hopefully, that makes sense.

If you look at the original contour shaded drawing I show, you'll notice that it doesn't follow exactly my logarithmic spiral idea. This is either because who drew it didn't understand completely what they were doing, or did, but didn't have time (didn't care), or, I am, in fact, making all this up and discovering this, after the fact. I don't know what the real answer is.