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 That—Day Eight More Contours

Like my younger class this morning, today I challenged my older students with BLIND CONTOUR DRAWING while looking at an array of objects. We again had ice cube trays, the wooden drawing mannequin, shoes, a lantern and a spray bottle.

Again, blind contour is using lines to draw the outside edges of the shapes seen in an object WITHOUT looking at your paper. This is a great exercise to practice looking at objects and focusing in on truly seeing that object and not just drawing what we think it should look like. The result often looks like a spaghetti mess.

Like my younger class this morning, some of our results today are a little too good. I have cheaters again! Although, I must admit that when I do blind contours, I am extremely tempted to look at my paper too! :-) Here are the blind contours from this class today—

After not allowing my students to look at their paper while they drew, I released them from their torture and asked these student to try real contour. This time they could look at their paper.

Drawing contour drawings that have good proportions can be very challenging! These students had to practice much patience and were encouraged to slowly follow the edges of these objects with their eyes and to use their pencils replicate those same paths on paper.

For those students that finished a bit early or who needed a break from contours, I demonstrated my scribble method to draw trees. This was a nice release from the strict style of contours as we could go a bit wild with our disorderly scribbles. Using our array of pencils, I used dark and light values to give my tree a bit of depth as I demonstrated the scribble tree technique—

Here are a couple of the fun results from our students.—

This and That—Day Nine: Profiles Part II

We had another small class tonight with two students absent. The one's who were present were a bit behind the others on the profile drawings that we started last week, including myself, so tonight was another great night to focus on those profiles again.

One of the greatest things I think that helped us tonight was measuring “proportions”. Using our pencils to compare proportions in our photo references then doing the same in our drawings to see if they were the same was extremely helpful to create a realistic drawing. Here is my drawing as it has been progressing—

This students had the challenge of working from a photo reference that did not show the top or back of the head. This is where knowing anatomical proportions comes in handy! Otherwise, it would be easy to make the heard too large or small. Check out the great work!—

This student is doing a beautiful job especially with the light values that she is applying to the face. Her subtle and smooth shadows on the skin are a great match to her photo reference.

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!—

 

This and That—Day Eight: Profiles

These students are ready for a new challenge. One request that I have had from my students is to learn how to draw the human profile. With photo references in hand, tonight we would work on this challenge.

Working from different methods for blocking in these profiles, such as using circles to define the placement of the skull, the cheeks, the tip of the nose, the chin etc., we began to rough in our drawings. Tonight we were back to using our pencils as this drawing is also a continuation of our lessons in creating values. With values, we capture all the subtle and harsh shadows to give our human face form. Here is some of the progress—

One student attempted a three-quarter view profile. The same types of circles can be used to block this type of profile in and it is certainly challenging!