Ida Rentoul Outhwaite Quotes

As an illustrator you need to understand the human body - but having looked at and understood nature, you must develop an ability to look away and capture the balance between what you've seen and what you imagine.

Do you have hands? Excellent. That's a good start. Can you hold a pencil? Great. If you have a sketchbook, open it and start by making a line, a mark, wherever. Doodle.

I learned to draw everything except glamorous women. No matter how much I tried to make them look sexy, they always ended up looking silly... or like somebody's mother.

Nudes are the greatest to paint. Everything you can find in a landscape or a still life or anything else is there: darkness and light, character dimension, texture. I painted heads too, of course.

I think only of objects: of a leg or an arm, of the wonderful sense of foreshortening, breaking through the plane, of the division of space, of the combination of straight lines in relation to curved ones.

If you start with character, you probably will end up with good drawings.

There are three fundamental poses of the human figure. One is standing. The other is seated, and the third is lying down... Of the three poses, the reclining figure gives the most freedom, compositionally and spatially.

Doing representations of real people is not my strongpoint as a visual artist, and I know that.

Being able to draw means being able to put things in believable space. People who don't draw very well can't do that.

If you're drawing humans, it can be detrimental to be too naturalistic, which is like animating little corpses.

I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form.

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

To be honest, making albums is really never easy. It's always a bit excruciating because there's always this fight to make it great, and then you hit these stumbling blocks along the way.

And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art.

For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.

I talk to all the creative directors today, and they take me aside, and they say, 'You know, it must have been great back in those days when you could do anything you wanted.' I say, 'Huh? Excuse me?' I mean, we fought. In the '60s and '70s, you fought wars with clients, and you have to continue fighting wars to do great work.

It is very difficult to make the ideas in my head come to life, but what is harder is making them look effortless.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

We made drawings the size of a whole quarter of a room ceiling, which we would then send on to the model makers. I did this every day for two years. Even now I can draw cartouches with my eyes closed.

Movie directors who have filmed F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' believe it's a big book looming inside a small one, and they aren't altogether wrong.

All my work begins with drawings.

I see lines of space. I break things down into lines and space, and I balance.

In painting feathers, you want to create the look of feathers, but if you try to paint all the feathers, you have nothing but disaster.

Behrens had a great sense of the great form. that was his main interest; and that I certainly understood and learned from him.