The other day, I spent a couple of pleasurable hours in a life drawing session. I don't know about you, but sometimes it feels better to just draw and leave the painting behind. Drawing the figure, especially, helps hone skills that a loose style of painting seems to dull. When painting, accuracy in drawing sometimes goes by the wayside. Paint slops over the line, gets corrected with more paint, which slops over a different line—ultimately, the painting should come together, but any drawing retreats into the background, with value and color moving into center stage. Bad drawing, as well as good drawing, hides behind that gaudy curtain.
Sometimes we don't care about the drawing, and that's okay. But when we're dealing with perspective in the landscape and in cases where accuracy of line and shape is important, such as when painting a well-known landmark, we should very much care about drawing.
The best way to improve your drawing skills is, in my mind, to draw the figure. Untold aeons of intimacy with other humans has wired our brains so that we know when a figure drawing is "off." You don't have to be a skilled draughtsman to see it. John Singer Sargent had it right when he said (perhaps apocryphally), "A portrait is a painting where there's something wrong with the mouth." The layman may not be able to tell precisely what is wrong, but he does sense the wrongness. For the artist, this makes it easier to self-correct a figure drawing. Just step back and look. If there's something wrong with the mouth, all you have to do is measure lines and angles and compare them to your model.
Over time, you get better at the process of measuring and comparing, and the drawing goes faster and with more accuracy. It's an incredibly useful skill when painting landscapes—or anything, really.
In my recent life drawing session, I caught my model chuckling. When I asked why, she said I'd been sketching with one eye closed. That was interesting, because I hadn't been aware of it. It's something I do habitually even when painting the landscape, and I've never thought anything of it. Working with one eye closed, monocularly rather than binocularly, I am seeing and drawing flat, abstract shapes. (It helps especially with foreshortened limbs.) But if I need to get a sense of depth, which I do later in the process, I can always open the closed eye.
