MASTERCLASSES; DRAWING; Just pick up a pencil and start looking

I'M SITTING in the garden of the Chelsea Arts Club, sharing a glass or two (as Chelsea folk do) with my art teacher, Stan Smith. We're talking about the agonising self-consciousness of sketching in public, when the painter Dennis Gilbert joins us: "I've had the most humiliating experience," he says. "I was in St James's Park, sketching a deck chair under a tree, when a woman came up to see what I was doing. She took one look, went over to the chair, picked it up and walked off with it."

If established artists are treated with such a lack of respect, my own prognosis doesn't look good. I can just about cope with Pictionary, but drawing isn't my forte. That's why I'm here with Stan Smith, to find out if what I've heard is true - that anyone can do it. Three areas in particular confound me: I've never been able to draw bicycles, my horses look like large corgis, and all my vertical lines lean over at five degrees.

Perhaps Stan can help me. He's one of the best teachers around, and his CV uses a lot of capital letters: Head of Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford; Honorary Life President of The London Group; member of the Royal Watercolour Society, Chairman of the Chelsea Arts Club. But can he help me realise my dream: sitting on a harbour front under a vast Norfolk sky, sketching with impunity?

What I find most impressive about Stan (apart from his four marriages and 10 children) is that he looks and sounds like a textbook artist. He actually wears a corduroy cap and a russet canvas jacket, and sports a mighty beard. When he talks, it's in the sono-rous, theatrical tones of Stephen Fry.

In fact, Stan is a textbook artist. His latest book, The Complete Drawing Course (Collins & Brown pounds 17.99), has sold over 250,000 copies. A follow- up, The Complete Watercolour Book, is to be published next spring. He's also consultant to The Art of Drawing & Painting, an educational part work published by Eaglemoss which draws on the skills of 160 artists.

It is at Eaglemoss's offices that we meet next day for my first drawing lesson. High above the grinding Lon-don traffic, approached by an ancient lift with concertina doors, it is an eyrie of bustling creativity. Half- completed canvases are propped against the walls; desks heave with ammon- ites, fossilised antlers, plaster casts of heads, arrays of dried flowers.

I find Stan in a cramped studio, where a photographer with a giant rostrum camera is taking pictures of a half-completed drawing. It doesn't look much at first, a scattering of lines in coloured crayons that vaguely resembles an arrangement of dried flowers in the corner. As I watch, the picture develops depth and texture. I can see the crimson leaves on one of the stems, as if sculpted in 3D. I can almost feel the scooped volumes of air in between them. Somehow, an image on a flat piece of paper has been rendered plastic and palpable.

That, according to Stan Smith, is the real achievement of drawing well - and that's what he's about to teach me. So where do we begin? First, he'll show me how to really look at the object I'm drawing, using visual "tricks" to see it with a fresh eye. After that, we'll progress to still- life drawing - analysing everyday objects in terms of spheres, blocks and cylinders. Human figures can be viewed in the same way, and Stan will show me how to draw one - even if it's seated on a bicycle. He'll tell me a little about materials, and after that it's all down to the most essential ingredient of all - practice. "A decade or two should be enough," says Stan.

WHAT TO DRAW

The main thing to remember is to keep it simple. Concentrate on a single object: a flower, a vegetable, or a jug - something that doesn't move every time you look up from your sketchbook. To draw accurately, artist and subject must move as little as possible; the thing you are drawing should also be simply lit. With practice, you can try a more complex arrangement such as a still life.

What people most often want to draw, however, is other people. Capturing sleeping children in pencil and achieving a true likeness in a portrait are two of the most rewarding exercises. Drawing children when they are awake is less so. "The main obstacle when drawing the very young," says Stan, "is getting them to stay still." To get around this, he says, draw from family photographs. Make sure, though, that these are a point of departure, not arrival. "A photo is 2D already, so there isn't the same achievement as when you draw 3D objects. Be warned: you can become a slave to photographs."

TRAINING THE EYE

"A good artist knows how to really look at things," says Stan. One good way to train the eye is "blind" contour drawing (see Training the Eye panel, right). Another is to think about the process of drawing and what it aims to achieve. Stan asks me a question: "When reconstructing an object in pencil, what are we actually drawing?" I think back to art classes at school. The line on the paper faithfully duplicates the outline of the object you're drawing, right? Wrong. That's only a part of it - outline drawing . What Stan is about to teach me is contour drawing.

First he sketches a face. It's an oval with two eyes, a nose, a mouth - the kind my five-year-old daughter draws. "That," says Stan, "is a West- ern representation of the human face. Those features are not as they really are." He adds shading, crescents of black under the eyes, the planes of temples, brow, cheekbones. "I'm not thinking about the features," says Stan, "but the way light casts shadows on them from above."

He's right. An eye is not an almond-shaped ellipse with pointed corners, but a complete organ with a curved cornea, lids, lashes, a lens, an iris, a dollop of aqueous humour. What we see when we look at it is a pattern of light and shadow - and that's what we draw. The same is true of bricks in a wall. Forget the hatching of parallel lines and upright dashes children draw; think of individual blocks of clay with ridges of mortar in between, the late afternoon sun throwing them into blue shadow.

There are various tricks to force yourself to look properly. One is to concentrate on the volume of air between or around objects, not just the objects themselves. That way you not only see form with a fresh eye, but achieve a 3D look. Another trick is rotation. "If you place something at an unfamiliar angle, you will draw it more accurately. What you do is really see, instead of letting memory lazily approximate what's there."

Even the greatest painters used a similar approach - not when drawing from life, but to get a fresh overall view of a painting they were working on. "If you look at the canvases of the abstract artist Richard Deibenkorn," Stan says, "you can see it. Dribbles of paint run in all directions." This, he explains, is one of the "signatures" of Deibenkorn's paintings. "When you see signatures emerging in your work," he adds, "it is very exciting."

For me, this is little consolation. My only signature, I tell him, is that my vertical lines lean at a crazy angle. What can be done? "Nothing," says Stan. "It's your astigmatism." I'm flattered to learn that El Greco had the same problem. That's why his distorted, willowy figures look as if they too are leaning into a stiff breeze.

ANALYSING FORM

Already, the way I look at objects is beginning to change. "Consider this bowl of fruit," says Stan, "and see how it's made up of spheres and cylinders - like almost everything." I gaze at the still life in front of me. An apple is a sphere, I agree. Its stalk is a kind of slim, curved cylinder. But what about a banana? "Oh, that's neither," says Stan. "It's a cuboid." If a banana is a cuboid, I'm Picasso.

We begin an exercise in which I try to draw a banana inside a lightly sketched cube, as if frozen in a block of ice. It isn't quite a cuboid, more a long block with tapered bits of the "ice" hacked off it. A banana is chunkier than you think. Stan shows me how to suggest roundness by drawing a few lines that seem to wrap themselves around a form, implying what is behind it. He sketches an arm in a sleeve, showing how the folds of the fabric can be made to continue around the limb, giving it more of a three-dimensional look.

THE HUMAN FORM

As with a still life, looking and analysing in terms of simple shapes is the key to drawing people accurately. "Even the human form is made up of spheres and cylinders," says Stan. "In fact, there's a marvellous set of Durer drawings in which heads are rendered as cylinders." Fingers, too, are cylindrical; breasts and buttocks are modified spheres; the shoulder joint is a complex combination of both.

Figure drawing is a large part of a classical art training, and Stan Smith has done his share of it. Remem-bering my problem with drawing bicycles, I ask him for a demonstration. "They are very difficult structures," Stan admits, "especially when drawing from memory. Frankly, I have no memory."

I ask him to have a go anyway, hoping to turn the tables on my master. He squares up to the canvas, grabs a pencil and sketches a few deft lines. Naturally, it's a near-perfect representation of a Raleigh with a cyclist on it. "How did you do that?" I ask. "Well, I know a bit about anatomy," says Stan, "and I've had lots of practice with the human form. I concentrated on the hunched figure of the cyclist, then drew the structure the way it had to be to support that body weight. It was logic, really."

DRAWING MATERIALS

Choice of materials can dramatically affect how expert a drawing looks. "When you see sketchbooks from the Victorian period," says Stan, "you notice they use three types of pencil: soft for the foreground, medium for the middle ground, hard for the far distance. If you follow that rule, your drawings will have a proper sense of perspective." But drawing materials offer far more range and diversity than that. In a letter to his brother, Vincent van Gogh wrote that the Dutch artist Franz Hals used "no fewer than 27 blacks" in his work - a figure easily matched by the full repertoire of pencils, charcoals, pastels and sticks available today.

Lead or graphite pencils are graded from 10H (very hard) for a sharp grey mark, to 10B (extremely soft) for a rich dark line. The most versatile grade is an HB, in the middle of the range. Seven or eight pencils (from, say, 2H to 4B) should be enough for most purposes. There are also carbon pencils, Conte pencils (very brittle, made from a mix of clay and graphite), oil sticks, pastels, wax crayons, and Tortillon stumps (rolled-up blotting paper) for use with charcoal. Charcoal can come in powdered form (for toning a background), or in a stick made from burnt willow or, more rarely, beech. With practice you will learn which materials produce lines of the desired blackness, texture and thickness. But you can achieve a good effect even with limited materials. "I draw with what I've got," says Stan, "which might be a burnt matchstick and some wrapping paper. What you need is passion - the urge to create, there and then."

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

I'm not too happy with what I've drawn, so I suggest I start again. Stan forbids it. "People always think they're doing it wrong. There is no wrong way to draw, but there is a wrong way to look - and proper looking only comes with practice." He tells an anecdote about the American painter, Robert Motherwell. When asked by an interviewer what linked him and other great 20th-century artists, he answered: "Doodle pads". True artists practised wherever they went. Whether in the office, in the garden, or in the children's bedroom, doodling is the way to greatness.

Stan also shows me how to use a charcoal pencil and a soft rubber to draw and rub out, draw and rub again and again. Instead of starting with a blank white sheet, you lay down a black charcoal background. Then you use a soft putty rubber to smear away the grime, "sculpting" the form in white rather than black, a bit like a photographic negative. "Being messy is important," says Stan, revelling in the filth like a child. "The line you first attempt isn't wrong, but it could be improved - and the erasing pro-cess adds texture and character." !

TRAINING THE EYE

Learning to look is the key. A good way to train the eye and the hand is to draw something without looking at the paper to see how your work is progressing. This is called "blind" contour drawing. Keep your eyes focused on the object as you trace its outline, and your pencil point in contact with the paper. Make sure your hand and eye travel at the same speed.

POSITIONING YOUR SUBJECT

Place your subject in profile against a background that gives you points of reference to begin from - a wall made up of vertical panels, for example.

STUDYING A PROFILE

Fasten the paper close to the edge of a board. Put the board on an easel positioned so that you can see your subject clearly and make your drawing at the same time. Start at the top left-hand edge of your subject's profile, choosing a point that is easy to relocate, and work down.

Keeping your eyes firmly fixed on the subject, draw the left side of the profile on to the paper. Move down to the throat and then to the neck and chest. Work slowly, examining every feature closely.

When you have finished the left-hand side of the drawing, take your pencil off the paper and - with only a glance at what you have drawn so far - place it at the top of the paper, where the hairline should begin. Continue working downwards until you have finished the whole profile.

CLASSIC SHADING: The pear is shaded with a red Conte pencil using the classical shading technique. The lines are finer and closer together in the centre. Varying intensities of tone are used to describe the way the light hits the pear.

CROSS-HATCHING: This is used to here indicate the different segments of the melon. Light is hitting the fruit from the top left-hand side, so the shaded areas are on the right-hand side at the base of the fruit. Cross-hatching can be particularly effective when used with a bamboo pen and inks in India black and brown.

INK WASH: The outline of the pepper is drawn in pen and ink. Different dilutions of ink wash are brushed on to convey the shaded areas. If the wash looks too light, lay a second wash over the first. Dampen the paper beforehand to give the wash a soft edge; applying the wash to dry paper will produce a hard edge. Use a steel-nibbed pen and No 6 brush.

HATCHING: Here, the hatching lines are curved to echo the curves of the pepper. Note that only half of each segment on the darker side of the pepper is shaded. This helps to show that it is neither a pure cylinder nor sphere, but a rather uneven form with clearly differentiated segments. Vertical strokes follow the curve of the segments as they go down to the stalk. An HB pencil is good for hatching.

SOFT PENCIL: With a gently handled 4B pencil, the direction, tone and shape of your pencil strokes can become almost imperceptible. In the pear above, light is striking it from the top and from the left, so the darkest tone is beneath the fruit.

Shading is a way of making objects look three-dimensional. The simplest method is to vary the amount of pressure you exert on the pencil, so the lines show up as different tones of grey. Classical shading, developed in the Renaissance, involves drawing a series of parallel lines at an angle of about 45 degrees over the area you want to shade. The closer together the lines, the denser the shading will be. Cross-hatching involves drawing lines in a criss-cross pattern. Different methods of shading can be combined in the same picture. The type of pencil, pen or brush you use, or the kind of wash - ink or watercolour - also produces different effects.

WATERCOLOUR PENCIL WASH: Water-colour pencil produces both well- defined lines and a continuous tone. Work with it as you would with a graphite pencil, then brush clean water over the strokes to create a wash. In this courgette, the pencil lines are blended in with a No 6 brush.

MEASURING UP

It is important to position the different elements of a drawing in proper relation to one another, making sure their relative sizes are correct. There are various ways of doing this. One of the simplest is "sighting with the pencil" (right). Holding a pencil at arm's length, close one eye, measure the relative sizes of features or objects against the length of the pencil, then transfer this measurement to paper.

SIGHTING WITH THE PENCIL

1 Position your subject in profile. Light the head from the left and slightly above to show up the contrasts between light and dark areas. Hold the pencil vertically at arm's length, keeping your arm straight. Take vertical measurements (forehead to eye, eye to mouth), marking the length on the pencil.

2 Still holding the pencil at arm's length, measure, then lightly mark in the position of the eyes, nose, mouth, and other facial features.

3 Holding the pencil horizontally, measure the distance from the nose to the edge of the ear. Transfer this measurement to your drawing. Repeat with the remaining features.

4 Check the measurements again. Once you have made sure that they are correct, draw the features. Stand some distance away from your drawing, taking care to keep the same viewpoint, and carefully assess the angle and position of each feature. Transfer to the paper.

5 The finished drawing.

Note: You must keep your arm straight when taking measurements so the pencil remains a constant distance from the subject you are measuring. Close one eye to make it easier to focus, and concentrate on looking at the pencil. Your subject will look slightly blurred but that does not matter: taking measurements will help you to get the general proportions right. You will add the details to your drawing later.

USING GRIDS AND GRAPH PAPER

Another method for judging proportion is a grid - a system of vertical and horizontal lines used as reference points. The simplest grid is a "division of thirds", in which the space is divided roughly into thirds, both horizontally and vertically. Any object placed where divisions intersect automatically attracts the viewer's eye. Graph paper, with its horizontal and vertical lines making ready reference points, is useful to prepare a preliminary sketch for a later work.

STILL LIFE COMPOSITION

Drawing the correct proportions of objects in a still-life group is always a challenge. In the photograph above the chimney of the oil lamp is placed on the approximate vertical "third" and the other objects arranged around it. The wooden horse is set at an angle to create a more dynamic baseline, and this is balanced by the position of the books on the opposite side. The space between the objects are equally important in balancing the composition.

STEP BY STEP

1 Use a 2B pencil to put in the main structural lines. Put a vertical line through the centre of the glass chimney and a horizontal line along the top of the pitcher, so that you can use them as points of reference.

2 Now start adding the tones. Hold the 2B pencil lightly, and use a sweeping movement so that you can add tone over the whole picture area.

3 Still using the 2B pencil, carefully draw in the details within the shadowed areas, but don't linger too long in any one area.

4 Start to transfer the sketch on to your final drawing paper. Use an HB pencil to lightly draw the centre horizontal and vertical lines. Refer to the grid picture for relative proportions and to the still-life grouping for detailing.

THE FINISHED DRAWING

The drawing (5) has texture and depth. The darker areas have been defined further by charcoal. All the objects are linked visually by the shadows and tones between them. The shape along the bottom of the items has been given as much consideration as the silhouette at the top of the composition.

BOOK LIST

The Complete Drawing Course by Stan Smith (Collins & Brown pounds 17.99); Draw: How to Master the Art by Jeffrey Camp (Dorling Kindersley pounds 12.99); Drawing Basics by Patricia Monahan (Studio Vista pounds 12.99); Collins Complete Drawing Course by Ian Simpson (Harper Collins pounds 19.99)

BOOK OFFER

The Complete Drawing Course by our master, Stan Smith, is offered to readers of the Independent on Sunday at a specially reduced price. Copies cost pounds 14.99 each (including post and packaging) - a saving of pounds 3 on the recommended retail price. To order, please ring credit card orders on 01403 710851 during office hours. We aim to despatch copies by return; however, all orders will be filled within 28 days.