Monday 21 March 2011

5 More Drawing Exercises

Here's some more drawing exercises to keep you going. Enjoy and don't do as I do... keep practicing!

1. Spider measuring
For this exercise you will need a sharp pencil. A biro would also do as rubbers (erasers) are banned for this one. Ideally draw from life. The challenge is to never let the drawing implement leave the page. In order to move across the page you make the marks as light as you can/like. All the time you are comparing shapes and how they relate to each other. I personally loved this exercise and found I ended up with some of my most accurate drawings from using it. Far easier than holding a pencil at arms length and measuring each point for me, so who knows it might suit you too.

The example is of the same model in different poses all imposed on each other which is another thing you might like to try.

2. Lifting light
Cover a page with a layer of charcoal, then rub it into the paper with a rough paper towel. Now draw your picture with a rubber, wiping away most of the charcoal for the lightest areas and less for the mid-tones. To introduce details you'll need to use the edge of the rubber, for broad areas use the side. 

This exercise can be adapted to work with pencil as the base. Using the side of a 6B (soft) pencil cover the page just as you did with the charcoal and rub it into the paper as before. As you work into the picture you can start adding fine lines with the tip of a pencil or range of pencils. Remember the softer the pencil is (i.e. the higher the 'B' number) the darker you can make the marks, the harder the pencil (i.e. the higher the 'H' number) the more detailed but the lighter the marks will be.

3. Negative shape
I've saved this one to near the end as what most people tend to do automatically is draw an outline but get frustrated because they don't observe the background against which the subject sits. For this exercise only draw the outline, but take a long time to draw it accurately. Imagine you are seeing that object in silhouette and look for the 'negative' shapes. Spotting the background shape can help enormously when it comes to drawing accurately.

4. Draw with your 'wrong' hand.
I met a lady artist who sadly lost control of her right side following a stroke which meant that she had to learn to draw and paint all over again. To encourage her and to understand her difficulties I tried using my left hand to draw with (I'm normally right-handed). If left handed, draw with your right; if right-handed, draw with your left. Yep, it's a challenge! It forces you to consider where you are placing your pencil on the page each time you make a mark. It also highlights just how much more control you actually have when drawing with your 'normal' hand. It also pretty widely thought that using the 'wrong' hand accesses parts of your brain in a different way and is supposed to increase your brain power!

5. Mix it up
Finally now try mixing the media and/or the techniques described in all ten drawing exercises. Have fun, play and experiment! You could try a montage of different techniques on different areas of your work or take just a couple of techniques to develop further in the same composition. Above all keep practicing. I don't as often as I should so always find it takes a while to get my eye and hand back into the routine after a break.

Drawing is studying. It is all about learning to look and translating what we see onto the page. When people look at the later works of Picasso or Matisse they often forget that both these artists started out learning to draw and paint as true to life as they could. Being able to draw is very much a useful foundation stone many a visually creative activity.

Wednesday 23 February 2011

Five Drawing Exercises

How many times have I heard "I can't draw". Nonsense. Everyone can draw. If you look at the history of all art you will find many examples of drawing and all of them are valid. There is no such thing as a mistake in Art.

What people really mean is "I wish I could draw like Michaelangelo" or whoever. Welcome to the club! I draw in my own style. It's taken me many years to shake off that desire to 'draw well', but since I have (well mostly have), the results have become more pleasing. Not just because I only care if I like it, but also because I'm no longer putting pressure on myself and that makes me more relaxed. Being relaxed in turn frees me up to do better and better work. Sometimes it frustrates me that I haven't mastered a distinct enough style but that's down to my lack of patience, nothing more.

One of the best ways to develop your drawing (and indeed any form of art) is to experiment and to get to know your medium. So if it's a pencil, pen, piece of charcoal or anything to make a mark with, first spend time exploring what you can do with it. By pressing hard you can make dark intense marks, by applying hardly any pressure you can make delicate, light and soft marks. By using a the point of a pencil you will get a different set of marks to those you'll get by using the edge of a pencil or piece of charcoal.
 
Drawing Accurately
For those of you who really want to put yourselves through hell by trying to draw accurately there are plenty of books and classes to help but here's the best tip I was taught. Draw what you see, not what you know is there.

It means looking long and hard at how things relate to each other, breaking away from knowing that a face is round with a sticking out nose and seeing the individual shapes within the nose, the lips, the cheeks, chin and eyes.  It means seeing the distance between the tip of the nose and the tip of the chin and recognizing whether or not it's the same distance as the nose is to the eyebrow line. Depending on what angle you are looking at the face it will vary.


To draw accurately requires concentration, looking at shapes, angles, light, shade, texture, form, measuring like mad and learning how to translate all that into marks on the page. My personal opinion is creativity is about conveying an impression and doing so in a personal and unique way and most of all in an expressive way. Techniques merely provide you with some skills to do that, but great things are possible with even very few skills.


5 DRAWING EXERCISES
1. Light and Shade
Set up a still life from man made objects which catch the light. Ideally shine a light on only one side of the object. On a piece of black paper draw only the places where the light hits the objects with a white pencil, pastel or piece of chalk. If desired, then add a mid-tone (something that is between the darkest parts and the lightest. Remember you are only looking for the tone in this exercise, not trying to draw the shape of the objects.


2. Eye Training 
You can train your eye to look for shapes by copying from a photo. Drawing a grid over the top of the photo and then draw an identical grid onto your page. Then copy what you see in each square of the photo.

The next stage is to make a frame that you hold up for something you draw from life, such as a bowl of fruit but you must be careful that neither you nor it move when you look through it, it must always be in exactly the same place each time. As you progress you should be able to see those shapes (that's all it's about really) without any gird or frame to help you. 


3. Contours
To indicate the shape of an object we can use contour lines which follow a direction to indicate how round it is or whether or not it is coming towards us or away from us. Henry Moore's drawings often used this technique as it helped him to envisage how the forms would work to enable him to make his sculptural forms.

Again only concentrate of the form, ignore texture, light and shade for this exercise. All these exercises are training you to look at things a different way as well as helping to build a library of drawing knowledge.


4. Textured/pattern forms
This time the aim is to only use texture to indicate different tones (strength or light or dark). Set up a still life and the rule is the lighter the area the looser the texture should be. This exercise is best done with a pen of some kind where it's harder to vary the tone of the marks you make.


5. Doddle Art
Tear or cut out a small piece of a picture from a magazine (a black and white photo is best). The piece you pick should have as many different textures and shades as you can find, and shouldn't be recognisable as anything in particular. Stick the image on a piece of paper and now try to extend and match the textures you find all round the edge. The aim is to make enough marks to camouflage what the original picture was and turn it into something else.

The development of this is to follow this up with a doodle of shapes and textures to help you develop your command of your drawing implement further. It doesn't have to be a scene it can be just patterns of whatever comes into your mind.

FINAL TIP
Save all your efforts and put them away. If you just throw things away you can never look back on the progress you make, so keep everything! There really is no 'one way' to draw so however you choose to learn, enjoy it. I often envy beginners as the rate at which they learn is never repeated maybe that's why I take long breaks between serious drawing studies so I can learn all over again!

Sunday 30 January 2011

Visionary Ambitions

Vision Boards
Whether you want to design a garden, a menu for a special meal, redecorate your home or devise some other type of creative activity, mood or vision boards can help to structure our ideas.

Recently friends have been using them as reminders for their goals for their future, from jobs, places to live and relationships. Some believe that by making a Vision Board you increase the chances of those things happening because the process involves thinking about what is most important to you which in turn helps you to keep focussed on that.

I don't think it will in itself change anything... it's not a magic spell, but as something to refer to see if we're making progress I can see it's merits so I thought I'd give it a whirl. There is nothing to stop me adapting it or editing it as and when I wish.

I've named my Vision Board 'Artistic Development Dreams' and very simply cut and pasted examples of previous artwork as the foundation for where I want to go next. The simple headings are to remind me of the areas and some themes I'd like to develop.


Fine Printing: 
I'd like to refine print marks so that things I print are crisper, sharper impressions. There are several printing disciplines I can use to achieve this including etching (for which I'd need to invest in a press), lino cut, screen printing, mask printing as well as monoprinting.

Precision Drawing: 
I've always tended to be lazy when it comes to accuracy so it will be all the more of an achievement to produce more drawings whereby I sit, observe and concentrate hard. Usually I only manage this when in a class and I have a tutor pushing me to keep at it, so it's important that I learn to achieve this for myself.

Pen & Ink: 
This is also to help me develop my accurate drawing skills but neither of these goals precludes me from scribbling freestyle.

Photographic Play: 
Like many people I tend to point the camera and snap without understanding or fully utilizing all the different functions and techniques that the camera as a tool offers. I spent about a year experimenting with photo-editing sometime ago to see what I could make from the images I took. For me photographs are a way or recording things I see that I like which might inspire say a painting.
This editing is simply to remind me not to let those ideas slip into oblivion. A future vision board might be all about developing camera skills; for now though it's not top of my list of things to develop.

Pottery Forms: 
This is my newest and most compelling creative endeavour. It's reaching compulsive levels. Among things I'd like to achieve here are to continue to explore shapes, forms, patterns, decoration and to learn 'tricks of the trade'. The ideas list is endless so it's tempting to place pottery at the top of my list for development aims but...

Painting Techniques: 
Conscious that pottery is beginning to dominate all my creative time, I'm anxious that other forms of creativity don't get abandoned, and particularly drawing and painting. Painting I came to relatively late as during my degree I had concentrated on illustrative disciplines. Among the things I want to explore are: figure and portrait painting, abstract painting and most of all to learn as many different ways of applying paint. Using resists, a spatula and masking are all there in the mix.

Colour & Design: 
Uniting all these and running through creativity are colour and design. I love exploring different colour combinations and also challenging myself to limit my palette to two or three colours no matter what medium I'm using.

Finally I've included reminders about pattern, texture, form, shape, structure, tone and doodles. These are the foundation stones to all creative activities. For me, doodling has been a way of noting down many an idea as well as leading to design elements and artworks in their own right.

I'm now off to create another Vision Board... this time collecting pictures of all the things that inspire me. From images of nature to paintings from Picasso, Klee and Kandinsky for their sense of design; Caravaggio and Vermeer for their quality of light; etches and drawings from Durer, sculpture from Moore and Hepworth, tribal and primative art, screenprinters, lino printers... who knows what I will find to inspire my next piece!




Saturday 15 January 2011

Quotations - Words of Wisdom 4


"The fool wonders, the wise man asks." Benjamin Disraeli.


"If we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome." Anne Bradstreet.


"Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum." Oliver Wendell Holmes.


"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads." Henry David Thoreau.

"Trouble is only an opportunity in work clothes." Henry J. Kaiser.


"The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg - not by smashing it." Ellen Glasgow.


"If you can't change your fate, change your attitude." Amy Tan.


"First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do." Epictetus.


"Think about all the beauty still left around you and be happy." Anne Frank.


"Sometimes small things lead to great joys." Samuel Joseph Agnon.


"The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us." Ashley Montagu.


"The best way of making your dreams come true is to wake up." Paul Valery.


"Remember that happiness is a way of travel - not a destination." Roy M. Goodman.


"Think contentment the greatest wealth." George Shelley.


"Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity." Edwin Land.


"Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties." Erich Fromm


"Experience is more convincing that logic." Isaac Abravanel.


"Let us take men as they are, not as they ought to be." Franz Schubert.


"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." Will Rogers.


"Remember, a closed mouth gathers no foot." Steve Post.


"Minds are like parachutes. They only function when open." Thomas Dewar.


"Don't accept that others know you better than yourself." Sonja Friedman.