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