Draw on That—Day Seven Drawing Real Objects

Drawing real objects was also the challenge of the day for this class. Vases and the mannequin once again, as used in my earlier, younger class today.

For these older students, I offered them a tougher challenge with our vase drawing—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”. With this we learn to look at things from new perspectives or angles.

Today, we looked at vases that were wrapped in ribbon. For those who were brave enough to try, instead of trying to draw the full vase or even the ribbon, we tried to draw the negative space shapes made by the ribbon only.

Here are some of the finished vases, some negative space, some positive space—

After our vases, we switched to the mannequin. As these students have been practicing with our different pencils and creating values and shadows, these students were offered the chance to use marker or pencil for their drawings. 

First, we looked for basic shapes. We blocked in the shapes with a light, hard pencil and then using a darker pencils (or marker), we drew over our shapes to show the lines that we wanted to keep. Dark pencils were also used to capture shadows. There was a lovely variety of techniques used. Check it out!—