First steps towards a model of style grammar in drawing

A process for identifying key elements that make up a drawing style would make it much easier to teach drawing students how to borrow critical elements from experienced artists and art connoisseurs’ different ways to see drawings. This paper starts developing a model of style grammar in drawing. A comprehensive literature review suggests line length, width and expressiveness, local and global tone, pattern and depth as expressed through form, outline, shape or object position are likely to be the most important traits to a drawing style. To test and validate the list based on human perception, a multidimensional scaling card sorting procedure was employed. Quantitative estimates of the visual features produced four dimensions; smudge, depth, tone and line expressiveness. Future statistical analysis may prove that the four identified dimensions will provide significance for comparison measures of style that can guide the development of a rule set for intelligent borrowing and design reuse.