Lesson 1: Fundamentals of Measurement and Abstraction: The Theory of (How to

Draw) Everything

In this class, instead of focusing on how to draw specific subjects, we’ll be teaching you
how to teach yourself, with some help from niji.

For the exercise attached to this lesson, see Study 1: Measuring With Your Eyes

The Theory of (why) Everything (is

beautiful)
I spent the majority of my life stuck in the gap between these two types of pictures.
Why do my art teachers think that that left one is not “real art”? Why do my friends
think that the right one is “boring”?
(Also, there’s this stuff I really didn’t understand, which everybody seemed to think
was very good)

I could brush it off as a matter of “taste”, or “style”, but I wanted to know a theory
of art that encompassed everything.

That’s what we’ll be teaching in this course. They’re called the “fundamentals of
art,” and once you understand how they work, you can draw anything!

The first half of this course will be focused on how to improve basic techniques, and the
second half will focus on using those techniques to develop visual concepts. We’ll be
using niji and methods from classical art together to personalize your experience!

Why Does it Belong in a Museum?

a certain famous painting by giotto

[what do you think is happening in this picture?]

Now consider this written piece from the same era:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan
Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre
croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne, And smale foweles
maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye (So priketh hem Nature in hir
corages), Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge
strondes, To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem
hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

That, my friends, is the first SENTENCE of the Canterbury tales, written in 1387, nearly a
century later after giotto’s painting. And it’s INSCRUTABLE, even to native English
speakers.

But isn’t it amazing that we can understand a picture from that era perfectly?

<aside> 💡 Language is the organization of verbal information. Art is the organization of

visual information. Beauty emerges when an idea is well-communicated, regardless of

HOW it is communicated.

</aside>

Accidental Renaissance
There is an entire subreddit dedicated to discovering a classical feeling, regardless of
medium.

The fundamentals: Timeless organizational concepts, on even your camera phone!

“Bedtime for Jeff the goose” by u/Soupmother from reddit

The photo above obscures information to tell a story. Leaving some things unsaid
gives space for viewers to imagine.

You can see the same technique being used here by Bouguereau. He didn’t draw the
arms of madonna. But he doesn’t have to: there is enough information already from
the rest of the painting that she has arms.
The Virgin of the Lilies, 1899 by William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Visual Abstraction

Picasso’s The Bull

Now you might wonder, how do we apply “abstraction” to art?

Consider this progression of sentences.

1. Exhibiting an elegant composure, she gently elevated the glass toward her mouth,
enabling the opulent, crimson-colored liquid held within to make contact with her
tongue, bit by bit, in deliberate and controlled fashion.
2. With delicate grace, she took small sips from a glass containing a nice merlot.

← Reality is around here →

3. She gently sipped from a glass filled with wine.

4. She savored a goblet of red.

[what do you think about these pictures? how would you order their abstract-ness?]
You’ll notice that both the most abstract and the most realistic sides of this scale feel
odd. “Truth” is not necessarily what’s most realistic. It’s the version of events that
the audience can believe in. The great skill of the artist is in giving the audience just
enough information to work with, and letting their minds travel the rest of the way.
Persuading the audience of the Truth
Real vs. abstract are two ways to swing an argument
Realism: Argument from the outside in
If it looks real, then it must be real. Realism is Truth through proof.
blk cat, as drawn by midjourney
Abstraction: Argument from the inside out
If it stomps around like a human, then it must be loveable, like a human. Abstraction is
Truth through induction.

blk cat, character reference sheet

The space between the two is the hardest to navigate: uncanny valley. The audience
doesn’t know about abstraction vs. realism, but it has an instinctive sensor for when
something is misplaced on the scale.
But when you nail the boundary look, the payoff is large. Here, her jacket is realistic,
but her face is abstract. Combined together, this picture uses both to appeal.
niji’s current default style combines abstraction with realism

But What About the Ultra-Abstract Stuff?

So given this context, you could say that guernica is hard to approach, because it sounds
something like this, if it were a text:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along
the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy
named baby tuckoo....

(This is the first sentence of James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man)

You scratch your head and wonder, what this sort of thing this sort of text is good for?
(besides literary “stuff”)

Reason 1: Sometimes new ideas are not well-formed, so they are hard to understand.

His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging
themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his
hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable
code. He raised his right hand and moved it experimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of
strobed afterimages.

This is an excerpt from Neuromancer. I can only imagine how vague this sounded back
when it was written.

It turns out, vague scenes like this form the basis of of the cyberpunk genre. Over the
years, artisans after the novel have slowly rendered these abstract scenes in Neuromancer
into a “Truth” everyone can see.
Reason 2: People pay a lot of money to be part of an exclusive, new idea, so they
look for ideas that purposefully exclude other people. (This seems like a funny
concept, but it’s a well accepted idea when it comes to fine art.) Picasso himself was
known to be a very good salesman, on top of being a good artist.
Of course, these are examples at the liminal boundary; most art style is dictated by
its purpose.
These are two concepts that have the same underlying principles, but say two very
different things.

So don’t worry about developing “style”. Peel away the veneer of “style” and learn
the ways to organize visual information. No matter what it looks like, at its very core,
it’s just subjects, verbs, and objects. Instead of the message of the text, or even the
way that the text is written, let’s learn to love the way that language sounds. Once
you do that, you can draw anything!