What is decided before the line
Three books that are not about the line but about what is settled before it: where you look from, what the form is made of, and how the darks gather. Nothing artistic about any of it.
I started drawing again this year, seriously, in a sketchbook and on location. What I expected of a hobby turned out to be an engineer’s exercise: the hand is never the difficulty. Everything is settled before it, in three decisions taken without noticing and paid for afterwards. Each of the books below is about one of them.
About perception rather than technique: what the eye corrects without telling you, and how to stop drawing what you believe you see. The professional transfer is immediate: an architecture diagram is nearly always the system you believe you have.
Hale takes drawings by the masters and redraws, over them, the solids they actually laid down: boxes, cylinders, wedges. It is reverse engineering rather than anatomy: the finished drawing is the artefact, and he reconstructs the decisions that produced it. That is exactly the work of walking into somebody else’s system: the shipped code is the artefact, and what was decided before it has to be recovered.
Published in 1899, and the most radical of the three. Dow imports the Japanese principle of notan, the arrangement of light and dark masses, and puts it ahead of line as of colour. You squint until the subject collapses to two or three values; if that arrangement holds, the drawing holds. If it does not, no amount of detail will save it. This site runs on the same idea: switching paper to ink changes nothing about the line, and shows at once whether the structure survives the change of ground.
None of these books teaches drawing, and read alone each produces dry work. They describe what is settled before the line, which assumes a great deal of line afterwards: I know no shortcut and have stopped looking for one. I also leave out materials, on which I lost a great deal of time before understanding that they settle nothing.