Thursday, March 19, 2015

Tracing The History Of Narrative Drawings

By Lelia Hall


Drawings, paintings, sculptures and other forms of artwork have widely been used from the ancient time to date for multiple purposes. In the field of narrative, art has been used in the form of narrative drawings. The core purpose of descriptive arts remains the same despite the change in time, telling a story either in a moment of an ongoing story or as a sequence of events unfolding over time.

It call for or requires some knowledge to understand the meaning of this art. It is very complicated to read and understand the ancient pictures since they are usually not organized in a systematic way like the words on a page. They can unfold in many different perspectives at once.

Narratives derive their history back during the history of mankind. There probably would never be people without these narratives. They are very important in learning the origin of man and the evolution to date.

Examples of these descriptive arts can be seen very early in the history of arts. They give evidences to certain occurrences that happened long back. Egyptian tombs and the Greek vase paintings are good examples from the 16th century that describe both the mythological and factual events.

During ancient past, before the introduction of literacy, most of these unique drawings were done with a concurrent descriptive style. With the development of literacy, art has as well developed and pictures were well organized like words on a paper which helped in defining the direction of the story more easily.

Another form of is the continuous narrative which illustrates different scenes of a story in one frame without any dividers. This is where the sequence of events within a story is defined through the repetition of the main character. It emphasize in the change in movement by use of repeating characters as indicators of scene change in a story.

With the dawn of abstraction, artists have started to look at art as a means of personal expression rather than just storytelling. In the past, artists struggled to express their ideas in relation to the universe by using large gestural strokes with paintings on canvas. There have been a development in styles from that time though.

Progressive narratives represents a single scene without repetition of characters. However, multiple actions are taking place representing the passing of time in a particular story. It not interpreted as a group of instantaneous events but rather a sequence independent on its location, it is mostly used in comic strips.

Descriptive drawing comes in different forms and each represent a particular action. These types include simultaneous narration, monoscenic narrative, continuous, progressive, sequential narrative and synoptic narration. All these are used differently depending on the artist's choice and particular intended narrative action.




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