Lesson 1: Re-introducing the Line

Lesson Overview

This section is an overview of what you will be learned by the end of this lesson.

• Demonstrate the effective use of explicit and implicit lines in simple pencil sketches, experimenting with different ways to organize space, direct attention, and communicate ideas visually.
• Recognize the characteristics of explicit lines (physically drawn, clearly visible) versus implicit lines (suggested by arrangement or alignment) in both artworks and everyday scenes.
• Explain how lines—whether explicit or implicit—can define forms, create boundaries, and guide a viewer’s eye through a composition, thereby conveying movement, focus, and visual relationships.

Learn

The line is a fundamental element of art and design. It can vary in length, width, texture, direction, and degree of curvature. Whether drawn with a pencil, painted with a brush, or formed by the edge of a shape, lines serve as the building blocks of visual composition. They define forms, create boundaries between areas, and guide the viewer’s eye through a work. Beyond simply outlining shapes, lines can convey energy, movement, and emotion, making them an essential tool for expressing ideas and establishing visual relationships in any artistic medium.

Line: the path created by a moving point

For the purposes of this lesson, there are two general categories of lines:

• Explicit lines: These lines are physically drawn and clearly visible, with a defined path. They commonly function as outlines, boundaries, or edges of forms, making them the most easily recognized type of line.
• Implicit lines: These lines are suggested rather than drawn. They emerge when shapes, values, colors, or edges align in a way that naturally guides the viewer’s eye (the law of proximity), creating a perceived path.

[image: explicit lines] [image: implicit lines]

Real World Examples

Let’s explore some historical and contemporary art that primarily use line, contour, and gesture to achieve the final piece. We asked ChatGPT to highlight each of the following categories: architecture, fine art, photography, film, and an unexpected art form – fashion design. We want you to use this section as a source of inspiration and motivation for your artistic process.

Architecture

Contemporary: Modern architects use computer-aided design (CAD) software, where line work underpins parametric and organic forms. Gesture-like sketches often appear during the conceptual phase, capturing the spirit or flow of a design before refining it into detailed, explicit line drawing.

Historical: Early architectural blueprints and elevation drawings heavily relied on precise contour lines to define forms, mass, and structural components. The use of bold, linear outlines in Gothic and Renaissance drawings helped visualize intricate facades and structural details.

Fine Art

Historical: Renaissance masters, such as Leonardo da Vinci, employed contour lines in their preparatory sketches to solidify the shapes and proportions of figures. Gesture drawings have long been used as warm-ups by classical painters to quickly capture a model’s pose and vitality.

Contemporary: Contemporary artists combine expressive contour lines with dynamic, gestural mark-making. Illustrators and comic book artists, for instance, rely on fluid lines of action to convey tension, movement, and narrative flow in their characters and compositions.

Photography

Historical: Early photographers like Ansel Adams composed landscapes using natural “lines” formed by roads, fences, or light and shadow to guide the viewer’s eye. Contour and implied lines in classic black-and-white photography helped define forms in stark, graphic terms.

Contemporary: John Brown uses a combination of implied and explicit lines to create stunning portraits. “I wondered how abstract and expressive I could get without the aid of a computer program. So I explored and experimented with just my camera and a single light, and this is what I came up with.”

Film

Historical: Early animated films by studios like Disney began as simple line drawings, with contour sketches defining characters before they were fully animated. Storyboards historically relied on swift, gestural lines to plan the movement and pacing of scenes.

Contemporary: Concept artists use freehand, gestural sketches to quickly convey the mood and dynamic action of cinematic scenes. Animated features and visual effects sequences still start as line-based storyboards and animatics, where contour and line of action guide the flow of narrative.

Fashion Design

Historical: Fashion illustrators traditionally used elegant, flowing lines to outline garments and figure forms, capturing the drape of fabric and the posture of the model. Early haute couture sketches relied on precise contours to communicate the final look of a design.

Contemporary: Modern fashion illustrators and designers often begin with loose, gestural sketches to explore silhouette and movement before refining the lines into sharper contours. Digital tools allow them to experiment with expressive line qualities that convey texture, fit, and style, making the line itself a form of expressive storytelling in garment creation.

Practice

This section is meant to help you build up your skill from observation to analysis to creation.

Activity 1: Interpret what you see

1. Find works of art or design that obviously use implicit lines as well as explicit lines. You can search for these yourself or use the unit resource gallery.
2. Pick 2-3 that strongly showcase explicit lines, 2-3 that strongly showcase implicit lines, and finally choose 2-3 that balance both explicit and implicit lines.
3. Choose 1 from each group that you like the best. On a sheet of paper, spend 3-5 minutes sketching each image. Focus on simplifying the image and loosely capturing the lines (both explicit and implicit) rather than aiming for realism.
4. In each sketch, label where you see explicit lines and where you see implicit lines.

Hint

• If you want to search for your own, logos are famous for using implicit and explicit lines
• This unit’s resource gallery contains images specifically for these assignments.
• Ask for help in our discord community, if you aren’t sure and would like assistance.

Activity 2: Analyze master works

In this activity, you are going to do what art professors call a “master study”. A master study is the process of analyzing another artist’s work to understand their creative process. A master work was, originally, a piece of work from an artisan that would be presented to a guild as evidence of qualification for the rank of master. Nowadays, we define it as a work that is completed by an artisan who society has deemed a master in their area of expertise.

1. Find 5 master works that inspire you. You can find these yourself or use the unit resource gallery.
   • If you’re choosing to find your own, these can be from any famous artist: from renaissance artists to anime artists, or influencers on social media. The idea is that they need to be well-known.
2. For each, take 5 minutes to study, observe and mentally note where lines are formed without a physically drawn line.
3. Now sketch the outline of the major shapes of the each work. Focus on the demonstrating where the original artist used explicit and implicit lines to create the work.
4. After your done, briefly note what you learned about how that artist used explicit and implicit lines in their artwork.

Activity 3: Evaluate your surroundings

1. Let’s create something new and experiment with the use of explicit and implicit lines in your sketchbook.
2. Choose a location like near a window, in a hallway, in a room where you can see interesting alignments. You’re looking for furniture, windows, doorframes, shadows, beams of sunshine, etc).
3. Before you start drawing, take up to 2 minutes to observe the scene. Look for lines that aren’t physically drawn but appear through the alignment of objects or edges (for instance, the corner where two walls meet, or the line where a window frame lines up with a piece of furniture.)
4. Roughly outline the major shapes you see. Aim to guide the viewer’s eye through your composition – imagine them as “paths” for the eye to follow and that organize the space.
5. After you’re done, briefly note which lines are explicit and which are implicit.

Hint: Observation is the key.

As an artist, your primary job is to observe – believe it or not. Whether you are drawing something from your imagination or right in front of you, you must be able to visualize it both in 3d and 2d space. So really take your time to observe and solidify what you are drawing.

Reflect

After completing the activities above, take a moment to reflect on at least three of the following questions. Write your responses in your sketchbook or separate sheet of paper.

1. What did you notice when studying and observing other works of art or even the environment around you? Which type of lines stood out the most and why?
2. In your sketches, which lines do you feel control the viewer’s eye the the most and why?
3. How does this change your perception of art and design? Do you notice compositional “pathways” that you didn’t see before?
4. How does this change your process for creating art? Or does it? Why or why not?

Assignment

5 days of Lines

Creating art is a physical activity and with all physical activities we recommend building a habit of observing and drawing lines daily (or as often as you can). This will reinforce the concepts you have learned and slowly create a sixth sense that you will execute but rarely think about.

Day 1: Choose one simple object in your home (like a mug or a small plant). Draw it focusing only on its explicit lines (the clear outer edges).

Day 2: Look out a window or into a room and sketch the main implicit lines—edges or shapes that lead your eye around the space without being explicitly drawn.

Day 3: Combine both types of lines in a single composition. For example, sketch a corner of a room, capturing some explicit lines (window frames, furniture edges) and implicit lines (where surfaces line up or shadows meet).

Day 4: Revisit the internet for quick inspiration. Find a single reference image—architecture, artwork, fashion—and do a 5-minute pencil sketch emphasizing the lines you observe.

Day 5: Reflect on your progress. On a fresh page, quickly sketch any subject you like and try to incorporate both explicit and implicit lines. Then, write a few sentences about how your understanding of line has changed during these five days.