Week One, How does an artist see?

Friday Harbor Drawing Group







Learning to Draw, Week One

Welcome to our Online Drawing Class
We will go thru simple steps to help you learn to see like an artist sees
Drawing is 90 % seeing.
Artist slow down the way they look at something

This class will help open up a different way of looking,
we will begin to see the world with an artist's eye.

First we are going to loosen up, stretch, get the kinks out.
Start by playing, scribbling......it's all good here.

There's almost no artist that ever gets it right the first time, everyone loosens up adjusts and works at getting towards their goal. That's going to be our approach, we'll start big & loose and take small steps to bring our drawing into focus. Don't ever feel like you'll have to get anything “right” the first time.

We'll define terms as we go along,
We'll be Doing Projects, feel free to extended projects if you'd like to do more with various ideas.
For long distance students, Please take a digital photo of your work, resize to a jpeg under 8 inches and email it to me at anniehowelladams@gmail.com and I will email you back.

Take a few minutes as the class progresses to check out different artists mentioned.
Use Google Image Search to look at work.
Looking at work is a good way to learn about drawing.
We will see how various artists have approached our simple concepts.
By looking at an artist's drawings, you can get a sense of how they think, drawings can be wonderfully revealing.

Let's begin!
90 percent of drawing is seeing, we will slow down the way we look at something.
Our eyes like a lot of complications. What our eyes can handle is usually too much to draw. We will try to eliminate peripheral vision as well, too much information!
Pick simple things to draw at first...don't worry, there will be plenty to observe. Keep it simple.

We want to put the verbal dominant naming side of our brain on vacation, and let our quiet visual artist side come forward.
The quickest way to get there
is to do something the verbal brain can not do...
That is, to look at the world without naming it.....
How? it's time for the visual side to take over.

Project, make a viewfinder
take a 3x5 card and cut a small rectangular hole in the middle, say ½ inch by ¾ inch not too big.

term portrait, hold your rectangle cut out the tall way, that's what is known as portrait
term landscape hold your cut out the wide way, that's what is know as landscape

Look in your viewfinder, moving it around slowly
look at shapes...it's not a table edge, it's a diagonal line. It's not a leg of a chair, it's a vertical.
It's not a tree it's a dark vertical.

Looking this way is an impossible task for our dominant verbal side,
do this until you see shapes not objects.
Find a curve
find diagonals, perfectly vertical lines, perfectly horizontal lines.

Find contrast between light and dark things. How is the edge of a piece of white paper against a dark wooden table?
You will start to see lines and shapes. You will also see some things are lighter and darker
Term: lighter and darker means the value. As in light value or dark value. More later on this.....
Project. Look in the viewfinder until you find some shapes, draw 6 smallish rectangles across your paper, draw the simple shapes you see in your viewfinder. Do a half a dozen of these across your page.
These might look something like this.

Try to see shapes, verticals, diagonals, horizontals, wide shapes,
this project is about seeing, not drawing, give it a try.
An added benefit of the view finder is to eliminate all the distracting peripheral visuals and focus on the scene or thing we want to draw.



Loosen up the pencil.
Hold your pencil like you are going to write, now slide it back, so the eraser is in the palm of your hand and you are holding it like a baton.
Move it around, see how flexible this new grip is. Some people hold four fingers on top and the thumb below. Try different grips, what all different grips have in common is that you will not be drawing from your wrist, you will be drawing from your shoulder. With your arm, there's more movement than with just wrist action. Pretend to air-draw with this new movement.
Many artists stand up and draw with their whole body.
Scribble around on a piece of paper with the new way of holding your pencil
Project, scribble BIG
Try scribbling an orange or a baseball.
See work by Cy Twombley, an artist who likes to scribble. Check out his drawing and paintings, some of them are huge.
Sometimes Cy Twombley's work looks like hand writing but there are no words.
Fill in a lot of your paper with scribble drawing.
Here's a Cy Twombley work, It could be 18 feet long.

Term, line vocabulary, different kinds of line created by thick & thin, fast& slow, light &heavy
Line vocabulary..... what can you do with a line? What can you do with 2 lines?
See Early Calder works, how a sculptor thinks in line, (wire=line)
Search Chinese Calligraphy, masters of line work!

Project, take your pencil line on a ride across your paper, holding it in the new way, find different ways to traverse the paper.
Vary your pressure, speed,
lift off and on the paper
Put on some music and move across the paper responding to the music.
Hold your pencil in the new way and pretend to write big, make marks without words. Move across the page.
Create a crazy drawing with scribbles and illegible writing, especially to music you like.
Look at Mark Tobey's white writing paintings online.
Make a “white writing” drawing.
Create a scribble or illegible writing drawing with different kinds of lines, expanding your line by varying how you hold the pencil, pressure, speed, and your own personal touch.
Artist to look at with great line vocabulary
Drawings of Matisse. Calder, Rembrandt ink drawing, Picasso animal drawings
For digital improv drawing, check out amazing Joshue Ott and his Superdraw web page, try his experimental screen, click on the the web version........



Materials, why so many art supplies?????
Everything has a slightly different feel, different materials are a personal choice, try different things find what you like...plain white paper and no.2 pencil works just fine.
Graphite pencils are rated B to H …..B's are darker and softer, 4 B is a pencil I like, H's are harder good for blending and subtle build up. You can find a wood less all graphite pencil that comes in all the different hardness's, great for line variety thick and thin.
Aquarelle is a pencil that liquefies, great fun to touch with a wet brush and turn the line into paint.
One of my favorites of the aquarelle family is a stabilo which turns very dark when liquefied. Found at our FH Drug store of all places.
For easing into color, pastel pencils are nice, a harder grade of pastel, gives a lot of control, good for portrait work.
Prismacolor, fantastic colored pencil, big color range, very versatile can build up a good density.
Pens, the lowly ball point pen can be a great drawing tool, as can the felt tip!
Paper, try as many kinds as you can, heavier paper will allow you to use wet media
For a painterly surface, try gesso-ing your paper then see what happens when you draw on it

Erasers, most people like gray gummy erasers, try it as a texture tool for the take home project. Erasers are thought of as drawing tools and for clean up, leave your lines as you go on your drawing. Try to get out of the habit of erasing lines that are not “right”......
Use a brush as a drawing tool, with ink wash, try some sumi ink. A great way to improve your painting is to draw with a brush, a lot. Use a brush dipped in water with aquarelle pencils.
Charcoal, lots of people love it... there's vine and compressed.

There's really only one thing you don't want to do.... no acrylics on top of oil,
(they don't bond and have different drying rates.) Other than that, anything goes!!!! Check out James Castle, a deaf and illiterate artists who drew with soot and spit. Marcel Dzama is known to use root beer extract in his drawings.

Project Find something unusual to draw on and with.
Old chart, map, letter, look around and see what you might have.
See Franz Kline Telephone directory drawings
Pick up a different tool to draw with other than a standard no. 2 pencil.Start to mix different media on your scribble drawings, see what might happen....



Take Home Project, Expand line vocabulary into different kinds of texture

Draw a grid of nine squares on your paper 3 across and 3 down, about 3” each
Create different kind of texture in each square.
How? Just like line vocabulary, vary speed, pressure, short and long, dark and light
Try another grid. with texture and possibly a different tool, be inspired by your surroundings to create texture.
Look around your house and get inspired by different texture ideas for a grid.
That's the end of our first lesson, have fun with these ideas and email back some jpegs of your work.
Nice grid of texture with sumi ink and a wooden stick

Wonderful texture drawing with felt pen on a Thai noodle package!