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Writer's pictureDr Takeshi Takama (CEO)

[book review] Learning similarity of art and science whiling drawing.

Updated: Apr 4, 2021

I have a habit of reading different books simultaneously, sometimes five at a time. I'm also using online resources these days, so I'm studying about seven subjects at once. But when you were a student, you were probably taking several credits simultaneously, and I think that was normal, but before you knew it, reading one book at a time became more normal. When I was at university, I did four degrees at the same time. It's interesting to study different subjects and see the connections between them. Recently, I've been thinking about the similarities between the way art and science are approached. The book I'm going to introduce today is quite a logical introduction to the art of drawing.



I've been doing a lot of croquis with charcoal lately. I don't know how to get to the beauty of Steven Huston's line drawings, but he's written a book about it, and I've been reading it. His drawings can be described as very simple, but at the same time, his explanations are also very simple.


Huston lives by the idea that only two things matter in drawing: gesture and structure. He doesn't want to go into detail about the concavity of the eye socket. This is also what Brent Eviston, who I mentioned earlier, explains. Eviston said that no matter how complex he looks at something, he understands it as a sphere, a cylinder or a box.


Huston explains it in simpler terms. He clearly defines the two most important things in that drawing as follows.


Structure = the movement that is taking place on the form.

Gesture = the long curve of the axis of the structure.

It is refreshing to have such a clear definition. And the book logically explains how it can be defined in such a clear and simplified way.


Another part of the book that I thought was very similar to science was when he went on to say that a painter does not paint seven pears and one apple. This is also very true for writing academic papers and reports. When I see young people writing reports, each sentence is in perfect English, but the paragraphs are not coherent, or the report is not coherent. In Asian countries, English tests are often based on memorization of fill-in-the-blanks, but often at the level of clauses and sentences. It has to be a situation where there is a coherent paragraph, a coherent chapter, a story in one report.


In the example of the painter I mentioned above, he said that you must use "seven pears and an apple" to create a painting that tells a story, which is exactly the same as writing an academic paper.


Back to the first point, even if I read about five books simultaneously, each book's content can be connected to each other so that the study becomes one story. So it becomes a story. That's what I enjoy, and I like to learn about different things at the same time. su-re.co is also involved in various activities, and that's becoming one story of a gift maker (^^;)

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