To celebrate the arrival of a new drawing pen, I used my Moleskine sketchbook to copy lessons from Drawing Made Easy by E.G. Lutz, originally published in 1916. His method is simple. He starts with geometric guidelines of outside shapes, then divides big shapes into smaller ones. Instruction in this type of schematic drawing was largely abandoned in the 1950s and 1960s in favor of supposedly more expressive strategies. Luckily my formative years included time spent poring over my brother Jim’s copies of Mad Magazine where this approach to drawing came to life on every page. Many thanks to James Gurney for bringing Drawing Made Easy back into print in 2009.
