Consolidating Ideas about Space

We talked about numerous traditional ways to create space in a drawing: overlap, diminishing size, change of marks, varying horizons, vanishing point perspective, edges, soft and hard edges, contrasts, high and low contrasts, ariel perspective, and finally what happens with color and distance. Luckily we had a beautiful morning to go outside and put some of these concepts into practice. It was exciting to see people try new idea and see good results. Seeing angles in vanishing point perspective is challenging, we used a handy yellow straw to help us see what subtle angle variations were happening in roof lines.
Sophie Marinkovitch showed her wonderful illustrated story, Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear now on youtube!

Consolidating ideas about Space, Week 5

More drawing from our sunny sunday morning

Week 4, Tricks to Put it All Together

Today was very exciting at our drawing class. We had the antique store to ourselves, and used it for rendering still life drawings. We continued our talk about shadows, revisiting the ideas of cast shadows, form shadows, core shadows and reflected light. We looked at Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring painting as a classic study in light and form. We revisited the concept of negative space, that being the key to having a drawing "lock in".....We used our viewfinders to see shapes around the antique store, not things, but interesting shapes. One final concept, we talked about rhythm in a drawing or painting.

Week 4, Part 2

We explored how to make an ellipse, which is difficult to do free-hand....Nice ellipses today!

Week 3 Seeing Values

Everyone got thrown into the deep end of the pool today and did just fine. We were lucky to have a terrific model today, local sculptor, Bert Fox. Today's lesson started with a talk about making a value chart, 1 to 10 values, as a way for artist to talk about lights and darks.We looked at a variety of artists approach to light and shadows, everyone from Vermeer, Rembrant, Degas, Chardin, and many others.
We talked about 2 different linds of shadows, Cast Shadows, and Form Shadows. Cast shadows we can see under the nose, or on a table. Form shadows we can see as a form turns away from the light, typically on a cheek. We talked about the kinds of edges shadows have, soft and hard edges and where we see them. With all that in mind, we launched into drawing from our model. Everyone really did a good job, seeing shadow shapes, and not getting to hung up in details.....Each pose was between 5 and 10 minutes long.

Week 3 Seeing Values, Lights and Darks Part 2

More great drawings from today:

Week 2, Demystifying PERSPECTIVE and other helpful art tools

Today we looked at several things that help in observational drawing. The first was scaling, that is using a "unit of measure" to measure the bigger whole. An example would be to measure with your arm held straight out and a pencil, the height of a lamp shade, from top to bottom edge. That would be one unit of measure. Next determine how many units from the lamp shade to the floor. This concept, either vertically or measuring horizontally,that is, across the form, can help put things in proportion to each other. A classic example is the head considered to be 1/8 of the body, or the hand as measure for horses. It is similar to laying a grid across in front of your eyes.
The next thing we talked about is determining angles. We looked at vertical lines, being very consistent in an interior space. Then we started to examine horizontal lines. This introduced our main lesson on perspective. First we defined the 3 kinds of perspective: 1 point, 2 point, 3 point and saw examples of each kind. Even though a lot of this information is very traditional, I showed 2 situations where perspective is very useful for portrait and landscape artists. In viewing the head especially a 3/4 view, we see the head as a cube. the eye line, nose and mouth line will all relate to a vanishing point, as will the placement of the ear. I showed an example of 2 point perspective, that helps to create a flat surface, such as a field or water surface. Finally we learned that vanishing points do not have to be on the page. Sometimes they are way off the page. We looked at some paintings and determined what kind of perspective the artist was using. We saw situations where one painting could have multiple vanishing points, all helping to control the space.
Please enjoy our excellent perspective drawings today. Everyone did a great job looking a difficult angles, determining what was happening, and figured out how to put them down on paper. Sometimes it was hard to believe what our eyes were telling us. It helps to have a few tricks up our sleeves to double check where things are.