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!—

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!