Drawing In Black White

Learn to work with only positive and negative lines and master the basics of composition, balance, and harmony with Drawing in Black & White.

The apparently simple and limited combination of black and white acquires a new level of expressiveness and drama in this publication.

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In Art and Representation, John Willats presents a radically new theory of pictures. To do this, he has developed a precise vocabulary for describing the representational systems in pictures: the ways in which artists, engineers, photographers, mapmakers, and children represent objects. His approach is derived from recent research in visual perception and artificial intelligence, and Willats begins by clarifying the key distinction between the marks in a picture and the features of the scene that these marks represent. The methods he uses are thus closer to those of a modern structural linguist or psycholinguist than to those of an art historian. Using over 150 illustrations, Willats analyzes the representational systems in pictures by artists from a wide variety of periods and cultures. He then relates these systems to the mental processes of picture production, and, displaying an impressive grasp of more than one scholarly discipline, shows how the Greek vase painters, Chinese painters, Giotto, icon painters, Picasso, Paul Klee, and David Hockney have put these systems to work. But this book is not only about what systems artists use but also about why artists from different periods and cultures have used such different systems, and why drawings by young children look so different from those by adults. Willats argues that the representational systems can serve many different functions beyond that of merely providing a convincing illusion. These include the use of anomalous pictorial devices such as inverted perspective, which may be used for expressive reasons or to distance the viewer from the depicted scene by drawing attention to the picture as a painted surface. Willats concludes that art historical changes, and the developmental changes in children's drawings, are not merely arbitrary, nor are they driven by evolutionary forces. Rather, they are determined by the different functions that the representational systems in pictures can serve. Like readers of Ernst Gombrich's famous Art and Illusion (still available from Princeton University Press), on which Art and Representation makes important theoretical advances, or Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception, Willats's readers will find that they will never again return to their old ways of looking at pictures.

This book has evolved from our deep interest and involvement in the development and application of reliability evaluation techniques. Its scope is not limited to anyone engineering discipline as the concepts and basic techniques for reliability evaluation have no disciplinary boundaries and are applicable in most, if not all, engineering applications. We firmly believe that reliability evaluation is an important and integral feature of the planning, design and operation of all engineering systems; from the smallest and most simple to the largest and most complex. Also, we believe that all engineers involved with such systems should be aware of, and appreciate, not only the benefits which can accrue from reliability assessment, but also how such assessments can be made. Our primary objective has been to compile a book which provides practising engineers and engineering graduates who have little or no background in probability theory or statistics, with the concepts and basic techniques for evaluating the reliability of engineering systems. It is hoped that the material presented will enable them to reach quickly a level of self-confidence which will permit them to assimilate, understand and appreciate the more detailed applications and additional material which is available in the journals and publications associated with their own discipline.