One hundred years ago in 1913 author/illustrator
E.G. Lutz published
What To Draw and How To Draw It. For many decades in the American popular press readers expected and enjoyed this sort of thing, techniques for drawing herons or dolls or the hound in mid-leap. Lutz used the same format for instructional panels (like those below) published as newspaper features.
One suspects E.G. Lutz actually produced his progressive drawing-examples in reverse order, rendering the relatively sophisticated end-product first, and only afterwards faking the simplified geometrical forms that supposedly led to it. The cat in the upper corner of the panel immediately above, for example, looks like a very close relative of the
Cheshire cat (below) created by John Tenniel fifty years earlier for the Alice books.
