My tracing of Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion, Plate 195, “Nude woman dancing a waltz,” 1887 — reduced to weighted gesture lines. Source plate linked, not reproduced (see note below).
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This is Muybridge, a woman doing a waltz. I was hesitant, I don’t want to draw so many, but then I thought — this is the whole thing, I can do a minimum line. So I wondered: what is the minimum line needed to convey this motion? There’s motion here.
Plate 195 is twenty-four exposures of a woman dancing a waltz, shot from two synchronized camera angles running in parallel down the sheet. Published by the University of Pennsylvania; this particular scan comes from the Boston Public Library’s Rare Books Department, one of several institutions holding original prints of the plates.
I thought it’s probably good to draw the weighted side. So I traced out a little bit of what it used to be, with the weighted side. Another interesting thing is that what we really need is the weighted side and the minimum line. She seems to have shifted her weight to the other side. The weight comes from Alon Bement’s guidance. He emphasized that the first and most important line is the one carrying the weight, which gives a drawing balance and realism, lost if we don’t prioritize it.
Just the weighted line — I don’t think we’re seeing enough to make out that this is a figure in some of the individual lines, but these are a group.
I don’t quite understand what Muybridge was searching for, really — there’s the horse, of course, which I think is amazing, and I’ll probably also do a cat one. Even the horse is flying, as we have motion, the weight of the being must move, the animal causes its weight to shift and move, and so tracing teaches the origin and basis.
Image note. The source plate (Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 1887) is public domain in the US, and the Boston Public Library’s digitized copy on Wikimedia Commons is marked public domain. It is not reproduced on this page, see the link below to view the original.
Links
- Animal Locomotion, Plate 195 — Wikimedia Commons — the full 24-frame plate
- Eadweard Muybridge — Wikipedia