9/21/11 Drawing I

Today's Class- Today we continued our work with line, doing a series of portfolio exercises dealing with gesture, reductive drawing, and negative space.

How to make this up-

Gesture/Reductive
I set up a still life in the form of a freshly cut stalk of bamboo, complete with leaves. If you don't have that exact thing, you can substitute another type of plant, a small tree, or a part of a full size tree.

For the first exercise, divide a sheet of your 18" x 24" paper into 8 equal sized boxes. Carefully observe your subject, and draw it in pencil using exactly 32 lines. With those lines, try to sum up the overall movement and the character of the smaller branches, leaves, etc. In the remaining 7 boxes, redraw the same branch, with all the most essential information, but with an ever smaller number of lines- 28, 20, 16, 12, 8, 4, 1. Above is an example from today. About an hour was spent on this exercise.

Next, on another sheet of paper, using pencil line, draw a portion of your branch, this time at life size scale (if a leaf is 3 inches long on the plant, it should be about 3 inches long on the paper), filling the page. Spend about an hour on it. Above is a student example from today.

Negative Space

After the lunch break the class did two more portfolio exercises related to negative space. To learn the specifics and see student examples, click here.

All of today's drawings are portfolio exercises, which must be made up by the midterm portfolio grading to receive credit.

Homework- Set up a grouping of 4 similarly sized bottles (all wine bottles, soda bottles, salad dressing bottles, perfume bottles, etc) on a tray or something else easily moved. Draw the still life using pencil line only, paying attention to sizes and shapes of each individual bottle, along with relative size and location of each bottle compared to the others. Rotate the tray or change your viewing position 3 times (so that the bottles remain in the same relative position to each other, but you see it from different angles) and draw it each time in your sketchbook, one view per page. Total of 4 pages, with 4 bottles per page.

For next class 9/28/11- We will continue our study of line, with an emphasis on perspective. Bring your 18"x 24" pad, pencils, and eraser. A ruler or other straight edge will be helpful.