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—Day Ten Gesture Drawing and a Whole New Style

Another last class. :-(

For today's finale, we had a great fun warm up by pulling out the charcoal and doing some fun gesture drawings of our model. Our model today—my assistant Devon. Devon 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!

So, in 30 to 60 seconds, what basic lines did these students use to capture our model? Check it out—

For this last class, I wanted to present these students with something really different from everything anything we have done. For many of our classes, we have focused on drawing real objects or animals in relatively realistic ways. Today is the opposite of realistic. Today is about exaggeration and silliness.

For inspiration, I offered up a unique approach to drawing as demonstrated by the fantastic Geoff Gibson. Geoff works primarily with Sharpies and crazy shapes and lines to create fun alien characters. His stylized and funky drawings decorate paper, skateboards, snowboards and many a wall of those who know him.

After looking at some of Geoff’s work, we all took a try with this new drawing style. Here is my quick attempt: 

Now for the kids turn. Using long exaggerated lines, swirls and patterns they produced this great work:

With another course complete, I wish to thank all my lovely students for their participation. I had so much fun getting to know you and sharing this experience with you. Thank you again for your bravery in your willingness to try new things. Keep drawing!!

Draw on That—Day Nine Filling it in

Today's older class repeated what we did the younger class—we started with one of my favourite, fun warm-up exercise—The Scribble Challenge! This fun activity for all ages that is great for developing our problem solving ability. Have I ever mentioned how I even have had my parent's try this one?

Once again, here is what we did—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 some of the fun results—

Staying on the theme of outlines and fills as created by our scribble drawings, we then moved on to today's project—TRACING.

I'll say it again, tracing rocks!  Tracing an image can help us create muscle memory, to practice new and intricate lines and forms that we might never have drawn freehand and to train ourselves to "draw what we see and not what we think we see". It  It can also create the foundation for a drawing to allow us to focus more on details like shading and texture.

For today's lesson, I used the beautiful, large windows that we have at our location. For each student, I taped up a printed photo of their choice. Student were to choose from pictures of buses or flowers. Over each photo, I taped a clean white sheet of paper.

The interesting thing with this older group is that most chose the flowers with more curved lines and  less small details. Some did try the buses later but those curves and organic flower shapes were just more appealing than those straight structured lines of the buses, today anyway.

After tracing, it was detail time! All colours of marker and pencils too were pulled out and the children were set free to decorate as they saw fit. Students applied all kinds of different textures and colour combinations. With these older kids, we also see some interesting attempts at shading and creating depth through colour variation (check out the use of the different greens in the pics below).

Draw on This—Day Nine Scribbles and Tracings

For today’s class we started with one of my favourite, fun warm-up exercise—The Scribble Challenge! This fun activity for all ages that is great for developing our problem solving ability.

This unique challenge also helped me to see the different personalities in the class. The free thinking creatives seemed to have more fun with choosing colours and fun shapes where other students had more fun analyzing the puzzle aspect of this exercise. And of course there were others in the middle, not unlike myself, who love both aspects of this exercise.

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!

After we were fully warmed up with this exercise of creating outlines and fills, we then moved on to today's project—TRACING.

Tracing is such a valuable tool! I have heard many artists refer to tracing as "cheating" but I don't buy that for a second. Tracing an image can help us create muscle memory, to practice new and intricate lines and forms that we might never have drawn freehand and to train ourselves to "draw what we see and not what we think we see". It  It can also create the foundation for a drawing to allow us to focus more on details like shading and texture.

For today's lesson, I used the beautiful, large windows that we have at our location. For each student, I taped up a printed photo of their choice. Student were to choose from pictures of buses or flowers. Over each photo, I taped a clean white sheet of paper on which each student would use markers to trace the image behind it.

After tracing, it was detail time! All colours of marker were now pulled out and the children were set free to decorate as they saw fit. There was quite the array of ideas here! Different textures and colour combinations.