Draw on This—Day Five: The Lion Pride

Following the success from last class, today we dove back into the Monart Method. Markers away!

Using the drawing elements that we reviewed last time, the students drew these amazing lions. Step by step we drew these together. Once the basic drawing was complete, the kids were let loose to add any details that they desired. Check out the amazing progress!

This last drawing is my sample that I provided to the class.

This and That—Day Five: Enter the Lizard

Tonight I thought that I would start with some inspiration. I have a friend who is the most amazing artist and has a truly unique and fun style. He works primarily with Sharpies and crazy shapes and lines to create fun alien characters. His name is Geoff Gibson. Geoff’s stylized and funky drawings decorate paper, skateboards, snowboards and many a wall of those who know him. This week I had the opportunity to video record Geoff in his home studio and ask him some questions about his process. To start our class we watched this video. I would post a link to it now but Geoff is shy and won't let me post him in video format online so check him out at http://www.samuraiinstreetclothes.com/.

After being inspired by Geoff, we moved on to our next project — THE LIZARD.

With this project I hope to :

• Challenge the students to try new shading techniques like the ones we reviewed in the last class.
• Plan a composition using thumbnail sketches and with knowledge of composition guidelines like the rule of thirds and eye movement within a layout.
• Challenge the students to try new drawing media (pencils of varying hardness this time!).
• Challenge my students to draw something very different (a blue stuffed lizard) that offered new shapes and lines that they had never seen or hopefully drawn before forcing them to look carefully at their subject. This is to reinforce the practice drawing what you “see” and not what you “think you see”.
  

STARTING THE PROJECT

In a follow up to our last class where we discussed shading, I decided to share some other examples of shading and drawing techniques from a great book—Keys to Drawing. This is a fab book that has some great examples of styles such as the no-shading, decorative, elegant line style of Henri Matisse, the swirls of Vincent Van Gogh, a controlled scribble by Edgar Degas or cross-hatching by Giorgio Morandi.

To warm up and to help get some ideas for composition, we started with some fun gesture drawings of our model. As our model couldn't give us any real “gestures”, like a human model, all of the students exchanged seats for each drawing. Each time they made a chair switch, they would view a new angle of our Model.

Following from our video where I asked Geoff Gibson about his process and how he planned a composition, we talked about some planning strategies. We discussed balance and the rule of thirds in composition. We discussed how a different lines in a drawing lead a person's eye around that image and how we can take advantage of that in our planning to encourage the viewer to follow a specific path throughout a drawing. I also got to show them the idea of thumbnail sketches—mini drawings that are used to quickly sketch out possible layout ideas before diving into a full drawing.

We ended our class by having each student work on their thumbnails and plans how they will be drawing our lizard model next week. I see some greatness on the horizon!

Draw on This—Day Four: The Markers

Today's class was awesome.

I had been struggling at bit with this class. We had been working on our Teddy bear drawings with charcoal and things were getting a bit messy. I saw that it was time to stop with the smudgy mess and try a different strategy. Inspired by the Monart method I switched our tools and started some new projects with the kids.

The Monart method is fantastic for presenting a way to see and to draw into super simple elements. Today we looks at circles, dots and different types of lines. We talked about what they are, and different ways of drawing those elements.

Using colourful and WATER PROOF markers, we used these elements to create fun abstract drawings. We also tried a fun and tricky duplication exercise. Every child received a piece of paper on which was printed a series boxes containing designs using various circles, dots and lines. Beside each design was an empty box were students used markers to try to copy these designs.

It was fun to see the children learn to work with the markers, something that they could not erase! At first I heard a few mournful sighs for their erasers used in our previous class, but the erasers were soon forgotten and a stronger focus was given to the exercise.

When we were done I had such a great feeling! We had accomplished two small projects, there was little mess, the kids seem to have learned something new and all had huge smiles on their faces. I think that we are on the right track.

Sorry no pictures this week as I had no camera. :-(

This and That—Day Four

As we have been working hard on our bear drawings for three weeks, tonight we took a break from the charcoal and switched to some more theoretical exercises.

Most of us had reached the point of adding a contour line to our bears and starting on some shading. This week we experimented with drawing similar contour lines from some home photos (my cat and my cup of coffee). Once we had some nice contours done, we took a look at a variety of techniques that can be used for shading.

Some of the techniques that we discussed and tried were shading using:

• lines,
• dots,
• solid shapes,
• scribbles,
  
• cross-hatching

For our shading, we also switched to using something new—black markers. These were great to create rich lines and shapes.

Markers were also good to use as we couldn't erase anything we had drawn! We had to learn to accept every marker stroke applied to our paper and if we didn't like it, we had to either lump it or turn that stroke into something else. This strategy is great for encouraging creativity, improve problems solving ability and to help to let go of our concept of “this is good” and “this is bad” in drawing.

New cool links found this week:
More shading Techniques
Cool cross-hatching video

Books from Google:
Pen and Pencil Techniques
The Encyclopedia Of Drawing Techniques
Complete drawing and painting course

Draw on This—Day Three: The Bear Continued…

Today we looked at shading. We pulled out our teddy bear drawings and by using charcoal, made our teddy bears a bit more three-dimensional.

Check out this week’s progress!—

Today's activity was fun but very messy. Next week we will change our strategy to something a bit neater—washable markers. The great thing about markers is that you cannot erase anything! This class is about being brave and being willing to make mistakes and to often turn those “mistakes” into something new and better.

This and That—Day THREE

Tonight, in my class of older students, we worked on ... surprise, surprise... our Teddy Bear pictures!

The next step for our drawing is to add shadows and highlights. We filled the bears with white then moved on to add the shadows. Adding shadows and highlights makes our bears look more three dimensional and less flat.

These students each have unique approaches. Check them out!

 

This is a very controlled and smooth blended style. This student is very skilled and quick! Much detail has already been added and has resulted a super clean and cute bear.

This drawing is mine. I have a more of a scribble style that suits this project well as it can help make the bear look fuzzy. I am almost done with shadows and moving on to highlights and details.

Awesome shapes and proportions on this bear! This student’s next step is to finish her shading by adding a bit more black and blending those shadows into the body of the bear.

This is one scary bear! I love how unique it is. This artist is using intense high contrast white and black which is a great match for the intense expression on this bear’s face. His next step is adding the rest of the shadows throughout the bear body and more blending.

Ah, the bear in progress! This student is super talented and has a strong personal style. For the shading, she is using a rougher, scribble style. The next step here is more blending and work to boost that contrast and pop this bear right off that paper!

Thanksgiving weekend

Just a reminder that there is NO CLASS this Saturday due to the Thanksgiving holiday.

This and That—Day Two

I haven't told you anything yet about my "Draw on This and That" class!!

This class has kids aged 13–17. I have five students and there is some serious talent. I see of these drawings and I am very inspired to go home and get my own sketch book out.

Tonight we finished our blocking in and moved on to contour lines. We warmed up by doing blind contour drawing of a fish. Once warmed up we worked on adding contour lines to our Teddy Bear drawings and are already moving on to shading. I will try to post some samples soon. :-)

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Draw on This—Day Two

Today was class two with my younger students ages 6–11. Things went well. Messy and fun. I know that I learned A LOT! I sure hope the kids did too, and most of all, that they had fun!

BLOCKING IN

For our first two lessons we have been looking at using shapes to "block in" a drawing. "Blocking in" is part of the rough preparation for a drawing. We use circles, squares, triangles and rectangles to lightly and roughly sketch out where we will render our drawing. For our Teddy Bear project, we are using mostly circles.

So, I was thinking—why do we block in instead of just starting to draw? Well, by sketching in rough shapes for our Teddy Bear we can quickly see things like:

• how will all the parts fit together (arms, legs, ears etc.)?
• will everything fit on my paper (am I drawing too big or small for my paper)?
• are the different shapes in proportion to each other? (are the ears too big or small for the rest of the bear?)

ROAD BLOCKS

"Blocking in" is a curious concept to share with young kids. Our class has a fairly wide age gap with many very young student and just few older ones. For the younger students, we try to have less analysis — explanations of the "why" we do this or that (like "blocking in"). These concepts can be too much for the younger ones. It's either too hard to understand or just not interesting enough to them at this age. For younger ones, it's more the time to practice just doing it. It's time to experiment with different types of paper, fun charcoal and kneaded erasers.

So, what I learned today is to not expect too much with the young ones and just let them do their thing. During the class I did talk about the "why" of this and that to encourage them to understand why I am getting them to draw a bear made of plain circles instead of jumping into drawing outlines and details. I am glad that I offer some analysis especially for the older kids who seem to be grasping more of it. But, I think that next time, I will try to talk a wee bit less and just draw. I will continue to present them with new ideas of how to approach a drawing  but remind myself to not get too technical about it.