The Line Between Drawing and Painting

Hard edge or fuzzy, thick or thin, delicate and crisp or vigorous and splashy the drawn or brushed on marks are what we have to make art.

I love the clean lines that describe form in a Botticelli painting and the brushy strokes of Chagall, or the hard edges found in Picasso or Leger.

So, where does line art leave off and painting begin? To explore this little mystery you might enjoy making a demo for yourself.

The experiment uses a few pieces of paper, such as ordinary copy paper (you can use your sketch book,) a ballpoint pen or Sharpie; something you can smear, such as charcoal or soft pencil; and some paint (cheap) and a narrow, all purpose house painting brush (99cents?).

Use black pens and paint, but you could use any color except yellow, which just does not show up well on the white background.

On one piece of paper, using the pen of choice, draw a line. You decide how long the line is to be. The idea is to look at your work and say, “Yeah, that’s a line, not a dot or a dash, but a realio-trulio line.”

Next, you make the line thicker/wider repeatedly until you feel comfortable saying, ”My line has become a shape. It looks like it could be something, perhaps a road or a strip of clouds.” Somewhere, between these two extremes is the very arbitrary transition point between line and shape. The moment of transition is personal to you, for you to use as a vehicle for ideas about imaging and design.