Draw on This Fall 2010—Day Eight

Pictures from day eight!

Draw on This Fall 2010—Day Seven Pencil Mountains

Today we started with one of my favourite, fun warm-up exercises—The Scribble Challenge! This fun activity for all ages that is great for developing our problem solving ability.

We started by using a 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!

For today’s class, I offered the students another new material to draw with—pencils… and not just boring HB pencils, but a full array of 2H, HB, 2B, 4B and 6B. These pencils vary in hardness therefore different pencils help to make lighter or darker values. Hard pencils, 2H and HB = light lines. Soft pencils, 2B, 4B and 6B = darker lines (the higher the number, the softer the pencil).

With such an array of pencils, one can use this variety of values to create "atmostpheric" perspective showing how in a landscape, items in the distance and close to the horizon line are lighter than items closer to you and further from the horizon, such as seen in a landscape of mountains.

So, this was our challenge, a mountain range using different values and taking advantage of all of our different pencils creating dark mountains in the front and lighter mountains in the back. Everyone had a bit of a different style. Have a look!—

Draw on This Fall 2010—Day Six Drawing From Real Things

For today’s classs, I was honoured and delighted to have a special guest! The guest today was my niece, age 10, who is a competitive gymnast! Why bring a gymnast to a drawing class you ask? Why, to have her be our fabulous model of course!!

We started today with a warm up exercise with charcoal and doing some fun gesture drawings of our model. Our gymnast provided us with a quick series of 30 to 60 second poses to inspire us.

GESTURE DRAWINGS are drawings that capture just that—GESTURES, or quick poses. Gesture drawing is a quick way of sketching a posed model and capturing only the basics. This is a great skill for creating a super fast basic drawing, especially useful when trying to capture the basic elements of a model that is is about to change position! Here are some sample gesture drawings as created by myself and my assistant Devon.

Once warmed up, we were ready to move on. Today, we continue to build upon things that we have learned in previous classes. Last week we learned to draw real objects from simple 3D shapes, like drawing an apple from a sphere shape. So, today we found shapes in REAL things in front of us. For example, what shapes could we find in our gymnast model?—

And, what shapes can we find in other things? After doing some drawings of our gymnast, I provided the students with a slew of object to try to draw. They drew candle holders, spray bottles and teddy bears and more. Here is my teddy bear sample.—

Below you can see some of the great work by these students including gesture drawings, and shape based drawings of our gymnast and objects presented to the students today. Many of the students also tried to add shadows to their objects. This time, we experimented with ways to created shadows with marker using lines and blocks of light colour.

Today we had a bit of extra time so for a final bit of fun, we did this fun imagination drawing using random dots on a page. I asked each student put 30 to 40 dots on a paper and then connect those dots to create one solid form. Here was my sample—

Using whatever style they liked, students were asked to find monsters in their drawing and to bring it to life. Check out these great ideas!—