The Haunting of the Lady Shannon
- THE HAUNTING OF THE LADY SHANNON - Black ink and black color pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size coquille board. It appears in the book, "OUT OF THE STORM," by William Hope Hodgson, published by Grant in 1975.
Every realistic drawing has to start out with a perspective, an eye level, or a horizon line. When I started this drawing the first line I drew was the horizon line, about a third of the way down from the top, where I wanted the top of the ocean waves to be, and to establish the viewers eye level.
The next line I drew was a diagonal line from the top right corner to the bottom center. The top of that line, in the right corner, establishes a "vanishing point" that I needed to direct all straight edges on the ship headed toward the horizon. In the lower part of the drawing you can see the lines of the deck-boards as well as the side edges of the louvered superstructure headed towards that vanishing point, giving the drawing a proper perspective.
Now, most people who look at pictures have not studied art, or have not taken lessons on how to draw or paint, so they are not familiar with such drawing technicalities. But everyone's eye and mind has the experience of observing the world on a daily basis, and everything they see has a natural perspective; objects that recede in the distance look smaller and smaller the father away they go. The rails of a railroad track are parallel to earth other, and remain the same distance away from each other no matter how far down the track you look at them, and yet, they look like they are coming together in the distance. And all that visual experience is stored in a viewer's memory.
So if I don't apply the rules of perspective to my drawings correctly, though a viewer may not be able to point out and articulate the nature of my error, he/she will still know that something is wrong with my drawing because it does not conform to the perspective of things stored in their minds.
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