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!