The Square Artist

Intro
The image of an artist making a rectangular or square shape with his hands, while looking through it over the landscape, is known to a point where it becomes a tiring cliché. Usually he does this to find a good balanced composition for his painting, and not just for the sake of looking artistic. But making a square or rectangle with your hands, or otherwise, and looking through it at your motif can be a tool for other things as well. Take a look at the two rough sketches below. They are identical except that the second sketch has a black border. The sketch without borders is just for comparison, and we will focus on the bordered sketch only in this tutorial.





Lets move on
Direct your attention to the bordered sketch and imagine that the black borders is a square formed by your hands, while you look through it at your motif (in this case the attacking man). Now, take a close look at any contour linepart of the sketch. Imagine that if the linepart you're looking at continued in the same angle, straight on, all the way until it hits the black border, the line would hit the border at a certain angle. Try and do the same with any other line in the sketch (on the arms, claws, legs etc). Just continue the line direction of choice until it hits the black border, and you'll notice that it'll also hit the border at a certain angle. All the different lines that make out the sketch will always hit the border at specific angles relative to the other lines. The same rule would apply if you used this technique on entire bodyparts.

Utilize it
When starting on a new drawing or painting, making (or imagining) a square that surrounds the motif, can help you get some initial lines drawn correctly, from which you can continue to build up your piece. Simply "duplicate" the line angles of the objects you can see through your hand-made square onto the paper or canvas you are working on. It is really that simple. Squares are also quite useful for perspective drawing, and you can read more on that by google'ing for perspective drawing.


The final words
Although this was a short tutorial, I hope you found it useful and that you learned a little new from it. The trick is to actually remember using the square principle, when drawing or painting. If you do it'll become second hand nature quite fast. That's it for now, and remember to check out the other free art tutorials.