COSTUME
Study and Design
SHOES TELL LIFE STORIES; they reflect our age, personality,
style, values, social and economic status, the era in which we
live, and how we stand and walk. Superstitions and fetishes
are attached to them: we are told never to put new shoes on
a table, and they have been concealed in buildings to ward
off misfortune. As artifacts in museums, they record and
reflect our common history, while artists have painted their
boots or those of others as personal portraits and memorials.
This class takes the shoe as its subject in building on
earlier lessons concerned with seeing through objects to
understand their function, structure, and volume in space
(see pp. 100-01 and pp. 104-07). Here we go one step further,
and after studying familiar shoes we use the information
learned to invent new ones. To set up, you will need several
large sheets of drawing paper, a range of colored felt-tip
pens with both fine and broad tips, and a selection of shoes.
REPEATED STUDY
To illustrate this class, I made numerous sheets of drawings, enjoying the
study and invention of shoes. You, too, will discover more, and experience
visible progress, if you make plenty of drawings as opposed to only a few.Linear Outline
Using fine pens, cover a large sheet of paper with
line drawings of several shoes. Turn them in different
directions and observe their structure and form.
Draw each one first as a solid object, then again
as if transparent, imagining you can see through it.