Draw on This—Day Nine: The Still Life

Today we transitioned from drawing from images on paper to drawing from real objects.

For a quick warm up today, we started with another fun duplication exercise. Each student received a paper with two columns of small, simple drawings. Using markers, each student tried to draw a copy of each of the little drawings in the column to the right of each picture.

After our warm up came today’s challenge… the still life. The object that we would draw today were a tea pot, a jug and a mug.

My sample drawing shown to the kids before class.

We started by talking about finding shapes within what we saw and with my doing a practice drawing in front of them. As we work with markers that cannot be erased, I encourage the student to try this simple trick—start with a light coloured marker. Use that light colour to draw all of your shapes and outlines. Don’t worry if you make mistakes, just keep drawing until you think you have the lines that you want. Once finished, use a dark coloured marker to trace over the lines that you like in your drawing (ignoring the lines you don't like). Once finished, the lighter coloured marker lines can be filled in to become the colour of the objects or turned into a decoration or even shadows!

As usual there was quite the variety of results. The older children seemed to truly try to draw what they saw on the table while younger children tried to draw a representation of the still life. By representation, I mean that instead of drawing the items arranged as they saw them on the table, they instead drew the objects individually and at angles very different from what they saw. With either approach, all students tried to capture the unique lines and shapes created by our display and best of all, it was fun. Lots of imagination was added by the younger ones too. Check it out—

Some of the students finished very quickly so we had some extra time for one more drawing. For those who were done their still life, we practiced our drawing with lines, circles and dots. As the children watched and listened I provided simple step by step instructions for another bird drawing (a much more simple version compared to our parrots drawn some weeks earlier). The students are not only learning drawing techniques, but listening skills. Here are some of the results—

This and That—Day Nine: Negative Space

Tonight was a fun night with a new challenge—seeing and drawing NEGATIVE SPACE. Negative space is the space around things. By practicing seeing and drawing the shapes made by negative space, we improve our ability to again "draw what we see and not what we think we see". It's really about learning to be able to look at things from new perspectives or angles.

For tonight's warm up, we looked at vases that were wrapped in ribbon. Then, instead of trying to draw the full vase or even the ribbon, we tried to draw the shapes made by the ribbon only. Here are some samples:

Playing on this idea of negative space, I challenged the students to draw something by trying to focus more on the space around the object than the object itself. In this case… a horse. For our project, we use pencil to draw the space around the shape of a horse.

This was also a chance to have some fun with some texture effects done with erasers. In my example below, an eraser and erasing shield were used to create white lines through the drawing giving it a texture that makes the paper look old… almost as if it had been crumpled up and then unfolded again.

Draw on This—Day Eight: Tracing Lizards

Today was all about TRACING. Tracing is such a valuable tool! I have heard many artists refer to tracing as "cheating" but I don't buy that for a second. Tracing an image can help us create muscle memory, to practice new and intricate lines and forms that we might never have drawn freehand and to train ourselves to "draw what we see and not what we think we see". It  It can also create the foundation for a drawing to allow us to focus more on details like shading and texture.

For today's lesson, I used the beautiful, large windows that we have at our location. For each student, I taped up a printed photo of a toy lizard. Over each photo, I taped a clean white sheet of paper. I drew the blinds in order to hide the windows. After all of the students had arrived, I slowly explained what we would be doing that day and pulled back the blinds to reveal where we would be working today.

Each student had the chance to trace two different lizards. One was a top view of the lizard and the second was side view. The fun twist on this exercise was that the second photo was traced with it turned upside down. Each child got the chance to experience how by turning your reference material (the lizard photo in this case) upside down, you are forced to pay closer attention and it is less difficult to be influenced by what you "think you see" as the object is so much less familiar, and you get a better result. I did not discuss this in detail with this very young class but it was a fun question—"Was it easier to trace the lizard right side  up or upside down?"

After tracing, it was detail time! All colours of marker were now pulled out and the children were set free to decorate as they saw fit. There was quite the array of ideas here! Different textures, colour combinations, settings that the lizard was put into, even some attempts at shading. Check it out:

For the children who finished quickly, a new challenge was offered… can you draw the lizard from a real model, without tracing and without a picture? The lizard toy was placed at the front of the classroom as our model and a few students jumped at the challenge. Because the students had just traced the outline of the lizard in photograph, this would help them in their new attempt to draw from a real model. See the wonderful results!—

This and That—Day Eight

For tonight, I had hoped that we could move on to our next lesson but as I started, I realized that our time would be better served finishing up our unfinished projects—our Teddy Bears and our Lizards.

Through this class we were able to further discuss methods of using charcoal for shading, shadows, highlights and texture (Teddy Bear project). I also had the opportunity to help students work on shading and contour lines for their lizard drawings some using pencil, some ink.

Check out this gorgeous finished bear!

DRAWING FACES

I had an interesting discussion with one student about how to draw men compared to women. How do we make a face look masculine? There are some general things that can make a face look more masculine, but they are stereotypes and are not absolute. These are things like heavier eyebrows, higher hairlines, larger features, thicker neck, square jaw etc.

Because these are features that can vary tremendously between different men and women, my best advice is to practice looking at and trying to draw from photos of men and women. From that, we can build up a library in our mind of chins, eyebrows, noses, lips etc.—which in turn will help us to draw a wonderful variety of people and faces from our imagination.

What do you think?

Draw on This—Day Seven: Scribbles, Trees and Perspective

For today’s class we started with a fun warm-up exercise—The Scribble Challenge! This is a fun activity for all ages that is great for developing our problem solving ability. We started by using a skinny marker of any colour, and made a large scribble on paper. Next, we filled in the spaces of our scribbles while trying our best to follow these two rules:

1. Use only three colours. 
2. The same colour cannot share a "wall".

Check out the cool results! There was quite the variety of styles!

TREES and PERSPECTIVE

Now that we were all warmed up, we proceeded with our lesson. Today we used our drawing elements (various lines, circles and dots) to try to draw trees. I started by showing the class a variety of techniques for trees such as using straight lines vs using wavy lines for tree trunks or using shapes vs short ticked lines for leaves. After a few examples, the children started on their own creations.

Before starting any of our trees, we began by drawing a HORIZON line which defined where the ground would be where our trees would be growing. This was a great opportunity to talk a bit about perspective and how things appear smaller when further away and bigger when close up. I challenged all of the kids to draw a variety of trees with some being in the foreground and others in the background.

I greatly admire the courage and creativity of some of these kids! Many were willing to experiment with all kinds of different shapes, textures, lines and colours. Check out the great results below!