Lost and found lines

 I find that selective editing/lost and found line is an enigma.  How do you know when to leave a line unfinished and when not to?  Is it just a feeling?  No hard and fast rules to memorize?  I have left a few lines unfinished but I'm never quite sure if it was the right thing to do or not.  My perfectionist self would like to draw in all lines where they should go… leaving one undone or leaving it off altogether goes against the grain somehow.

Here is what I gleaned from my professor of Clothed Figure Drawing, Sandra Spiedel, Academy of Art University in San Francisco:  "There are no hard and fast rules craved in stone about lines and line quality, but you can leave out the less important lines.  Which are those?  The ones that are not integral to the weight of gesture of the pose.  The main gesture of the pose is integral to the pose, that is, the main gesture carries the bones and muscles that hold the pose together.  For example, if the model is standing on one leg, that leg is holding all the weight, and that leg needs to be firmly planted and delineated in your drawing. The other leg can be drawn more lightly, is not integral to the pose, and some of it might be lost without consequence to the integrity of the overall pose."

Loosing some of the detail helps to point the focus to other parts of the design and drawing.  It also shows the lightness of that part of the body.  Losing some of the line can also give a sense of motion to that part of the body.

It seems also that once we learn the rules of form and gesture it is all right to break them in intelligent and informed way.  It helps to think in terms of light and shadow also.  Lighter lines in the lightand darker heavier lines in the shadows.  Still all the lines seem important to me and I still have trouble choosing to “loose” unimportant lines when drawing.