Ever wondered what goes on in my studio classes?
This year I have been running a group called “Getting the most from your sketchbook”, which started as a simple concept of inviting students to bring along their sketchbooks and working in or around my studio for a couple of hours. I would introduce a theme and demonstrate a technique and they could either follow that or do their own thing. Although I ask people to bring their own sketchbooks, pencils and watercolours, I can demonstrate other media from my store and they can try out some of these or borrow each other’s.
Working in a small group creates a friendly, not too pressured atmosphere and after a few sessions of ‘testing the water’ it became clear that the participants all felt they had never had any basic, formal drawing in how to draw and we agreed I would plan a series of lessons on basic drawing skills, including mark making, shading, single and double point perspective and composition.
Anna Mieszkian has kindly allowed me to share some of her lovely drawings which illustrate some of the things we covered in the drawing skills course.
many hands
On one afternoon we focused exclusively on hands, looking at their proportions relative to the body, thinking about their use in language and idioms, drawing round them and sketching them. Hands are remarkable organs, with such fine motor skills and interesting structure but often fudged or overlooked when drawing the figure.
This was a warm up exercise following the twists and turns of a fine piece of ribbon. It was an exercise in seeing and keeping the viewpoint steady so that the ribbon appears convincingly three dimensional. The shadows help to create the depth of field. Anna has varied the thickness of her lines which adds life and interest.
single point perspective
in this warm up exercise we began exploring single point perspective to create the illusion of blocks exploding out into space.
Using her imagination, Anna made use of single point perspective to create this lovely black and white image of a canal boat.
two point perspective
We moved on to two point perspective and Anna made use of this new concept when she sketched this pile of books. It was interesting noticing the shapes of the planes of the books and getting the correct proportions of the different thickness spines.
drawing people from weird angles
We did various exercises to build on what we had learned about perspective. On one afternoon we experimented with drawing people from unusual angles, noticing how much larger features appear when they are close up to those that are further away.
This produced some great results as the images were very unusual!
That’s just a small taste for now! I have more students’ work to show in the coming days, including work from the most recent course focusing on colour