Ever think about drawing a bird’s nest? Olivia found a nest full of eggs and took multiple photos. Did you know that blue jays lay bluish-green eggs? I learn so much from my students! Her plan is graphite on the nest and colored pencil on the eggs. When drawing a complicated and repetitive subject, block out all but the section on which you are working. Post-it notes are perfect for this.
Drawing buildings is the first thing I did in my career. Cabins, specifically. (“cabinart”, anyone?) These are not difficult for me, but many of my students would rather do anything else, even faces! Wendy is up for any challenge on a piece of paper – here is her beginnings of the Presbyterian Church in Three Rivers, a beautiful structure in a beautiful setting. The most important things to know in rendering buildings accurately are these: 1. vertical is ALWAYS vertical – it is the horizontal lines that do the slant tricks and 2. it is okay to use a straight edge to make straight edge.
Collages are some of the most difficult pictures to plan. One begins with a selection of photos. There are so many decisions to make! Horizontal? Vertical? How many parts? Images touching each other, overlapping or with spaces in between? Which one should be The Big Deal? Use circles or ovals within the space? The best way to start is with sketches, called “thumbnails” because of their small size. I hated doing those in college because I usually only had one good idea, and it was such a waste of time to try to conjure up a page full of second and third best substitutes. Maggie had this idea for months, letting it develop in her mind’s eye and gathering the photos. It is turning out beautifully!
This comes from a borrowed photo but it is cropped beyond recognition. Cropping is a great way to focus in on the part of a subject that causes your heart to sing! Pam is creating a piece for her dining room. She is learning that many of the principles of graphite apply to colored pencil. She is also learning this: really good colored pencil pieces take 3-4 times as long to produce as graphite!
Jackie is very experienced in graphite and may be one of the most careful of all my students. She has been known to erase and redo entire areas over and over. Because she has a light touch, this doesn’t destroy the tooth of the paper. She works from her own photos, and occasionally from borrowed photos but generally redesigns them (wish you could see her rocks/leaves/water drawing!). In this drawing, she has changed the colors, and edited out weird parts that don’t make sense. Weird things are believable in photos, but in drawings they look as if the artist messed up.
Adalaide shows an usual ability to design art rather than just copy photographs. She works from her own photos, but occasionally uses images from other sources. This shows the flags as she designed them, and then she got the idea of adding the insignia from her brother’s Air Force patch in the background. After some thought and experimentation on tissue paper over the top, she decided to draw the patch as a separate piece. Planning on tissue paper over the top is a great method of designing changes to an existing piece of art.
Before anyone graduates to colored pencil, they need to have skill with graphite. If one doesn’t understand the steps of drawing accurately, adding color to the mix is not going to improve one’s skill or one’s finished pieces. Wendy is very very good with graphite and has a wonderfully light touch that makes her colored pencil drawings both have depth and a glow. She has begun this picture with a gray scale underneath in gray colored pencils, not graphite. This method is called “grisaille” – pronounced “greeze eye”.
This is the beginning of a colored pencil portrait. It looks like a heavy graphite outline, but this will go away as each color is applied. Mae is another traveler who works from her own photos. She looks very very carefully at each subject and crops and rearranges to make the best compositions possible. Being the proud owner of a new set of high-end colored pencils, she is also learning how to combine the colors to depict all the skin tones. Mae is a water-color painter who wanted to be more accurate in her shapes, and after 3 or 4 years with me, she is very accurate. Her paintings are reflecting her growing skill; this brings up the point that drawing is the basis of all art.
This is in graphite and has been spray-fixed so it won’t smear. Next, the giant pot/vase thing will be done in colored pencil. Mary works from the photos she takes on her travels all over the world. Working from one’s own photos is best: no copyright problems and great familiarity with the subject are the advantages.
This is a very difficult photo from which to draw. It has a zillion different textures and it is only 3-1/2 x 5″ (Aren’t we spoiled by the 4×6″ size now?) Olivia has diligently worked her way from top to bottom, left to right. We have done a bit of redesigning because there are some particularly annoying shrubs that neither of us can figure out how to duplicate with a pencil. There is no need to be handcuffed by a photo – it is YOUR drawing, and you can do whatever you need to make it look best. Real Life Is Messy; Artists get to clean it up!