The Constructive Approach

[holland]

The constructive approach to art combines construction skills with parallel or perspective staging. It is one of the most difficult approaches to learn, as it combines the mechanical theories underlying technical art with the intuitive flow of automatic art to produce refined work from the imagination or specs (written description).

Although it takes a long time to learn, the constructive approach is very fast to apply, because you don't need to spend as much time gathering or creating precise references. The meaning behind what you're trying to communicate is typically prioritized over perfect accuracy. This makes it popular in fields like animation and comics, where you need to draw the same subject matter over and over again from different angles, poses, and lighting situations with a strong emphasis on expression.

Constructive art enables you to draw any subject you're capable of constructing, as if they were made of any material you're capable of rendering, in any visual scenario you can imagine, through logic alone. Doing so (once skilled) only requires a period of studying the subject or something akin to a character reference sheet.

Whereas accomplishing the same scene with an observational approach would require thousands of carefully prepared references of that subject being moved through the scenario in precisely the correct context. That obviously has its limits, and there was a time where photography did not exist and models were prohibitively expensive, so that working with construction was a practical necessity for much of art history.

Even if you could access a model for a big job with good pay, that didn't mean you could travel to a location with a perfectly suitable reference environment, and you were still left to fund references for your personal sketches and studies. So the more blanks you could fill in yourself about what things were supposed to look like, the better.