Saturday, October 30, 2010

Draw on This Fall 2010—Day Five
More Charcoal Drawings

In honour of Halloween, I offered my students a fun Frankenstein style exercise to warm them up and spark their imaginations. Each student received a piece of paper on which they create a pair of feet. They then passed the paper to another student who added legs onto the feet. The paper was passed again and that student drew on a torso and arms. The paper was passed one last time and the last student drew a head. For these body parts, the students could draw animal parts, robot parts, human parts, monster parts, or whatever their imaginations could conjure up.

This was a great fun experiment with some crazy results. Check out a sample—


After our fun warm up and time to see everyone's monstrous creations, we started today’s lesson that continued our exploration of the use of wonderful, messy charcoal!

Last week, the students learned to draw some simple three dimensional shapes and how to apply shadows with soft, blending charcoal. Today we continued with this lesson and worked on creating cones and cylinders. Once we created these shapes, I challenged the students to create these objects from all of the shapes that we have learned.

For next week, we will look at what we can do with these simple shapes. These great ideas come from the epic Jon Gnagy whose lesson books I read over 30 years ago. These are classics for sure!


These students did a great job and I am very impressed with the results. Check out the subtle details!—


Way to go class!

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Draw on This Fall 2010—Day Four
Charcoal Shadows

Now these student have explored markers, and basic shapes and lines, it’s time for something different so this morning we changed things up a bit. This morning we tried CHARCOAL. With these students, charcoal is a lot of fun but also extra messy. By the end of class, there was not a one student who had probably not smudged their clothes or faces with some mark of the black stuff.

The great thing about charcoal is the smooth lines that it makes on paper, how it can be smudged into soft shapes and gradients and that it can be erased (to a degree) with fun kneaded erasers! After a quick duplication drawing warm up and playing with our charcoal to get a bit of a feel for it, we began our lesson.

Today we learned about shading—shading a ball in particular.  Step by step, I took my students through the idea of drawing a circle and how to apply a shadow to one side of it. We also looked at how to add a shadow beside our ball—the shadow that the ball would cast upon the table that it would be sitting on. Playing with erasers and blending stumps, we practiced smudging our charcoal to create soft shadows.

Here was my first simple sample of a sphere:

 

After the students completed their spheres, we went on to explore some other shapes:

Each of the students did a fabulous job of trying these techniques. This is a great age to learn by copying and the class did a very impressive job of duplicating these shapes. Here is what the class came up with:
And a special thanks goes out to my assistant Devon today who took over the class for a few minutes and showed the students how to draw this sphere:

For next week, we will look at what we can do with these simple shapes. These great ideas come from the epic Jon Gnagy whose lesson books I read over 30 years ago. These are classics for sure!

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Draw on This Fall 2010—Day Three
Horse Sense

Today is class three and it’s time for something a bit more challenging—the carousel horse—

Today I had the students put together all the basic things that we have learned and step by step we took on this new drawing. This is one is pretty complicated so I know some of the students were a bit aprehensive. But as I have said, this is a BRAVE class and they took on the challenge.

We started by using light coloured markers to block in some basic shapes to help us see how our horse would fit on our paper. After that, we drew each little line, one by one. The most complicated lines were probably the legs with all their little curly lines to show the horses muscles, knees and hooves. Check out the great work—


After our horse drawing, we had a few minutes left to try one more little drawing. As an introduction to next week’s class on shading, I showed the class this little gremlin face—

Note the use of simple lines to create shadows on the face, ears and nose to create more round, three-dimensional shapes. We didn’t get to talk at great length about these shadows but we did quickly draw each line to make our gremlin faces and some students got to take a few quick minutes to try to replicate the shadow lines. These students will have to wait until next week for more. In the mean time, have a look at these great drawings!—