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FROTTAGE
Frottage is a French term and it means to
take an impression by rubbing. We have
probably all done some frottage at some
point or other. Have you ever taken a
rubbing from a coin when you were little?
Then that was a work of frottage. Brass
rubbing is another form of frottage.
As a drawing technique and process we
can expand and use frottage as a tool to
express our ideas and it has been used by
many artists particularly in the twentieth
century for this very purpose. No less an
artist than Max Ernst used this process to
great effect in the early part of the last
century.
We make frottage very simply. You need
some cheap, thin newsprint paper, some
compressed charcoal, some fixative, and an
open experimental attitude to your resource
material. This being any form of surface that
has a texture that you find interesting.
We are going to create a drawing from
frottage. Our subject is a landscape because
landscape lends itself very much to this
process. Firstly, you need to collect a
number of rubbings (frottage) from a variety
of textures that you can find in the
environment around you. Do this by simply
putting the paper over the chosen texture
and then place the compressed charcoal on
to the paper and rub it firmly over the top. By
doing this you will recreate the texture
underneath. Do this many times over many
different types of texture as this forms your
resource material for making the drawing
that will take the form of a collage (collage is
a picture which is built up wholly or partly
from pieces of paper or other materials).
These surface textures you are creating can
be regular and geometric or from nature.
Ensure you fix the impression as soon as you
have made it to preserve it. Now you have
collected your source material you can now
think about the next step in this process.
The landscape we are going to produce
needs to be researched. For this, you need to
make some basic sketches of the view you
have chosen. It would be useful to do about
half dozen drawings from different
viewpoints, giving you a greater choice of
subject matter when you come to do the
finished work at home or in the studio.
To start, you need to transfer one of your
sketches to a larger piece of paper, prefer -
ably A1. The sketch you choose should have
a good sense of depth to it. For example it
should have a composition that contains a
clear foreground, middle ground, and
identifiable horizon. Do this in a linear way,
drawing around the shapes of the areas that
occupy the landscape, creating what appear
to be silhouettes around the objects.
You will need to fill in these shapes with
textures from your research, to give an
impression of the landscape you created in
your original sketches. You also might find
that you have to make more frottage for
particular areas in your picture.Compressed charcoal – projects