Here is another sunflower drawing. Shereen works from her own photographs, and she is quite experienced at drawing. She has the outline of the petals on the page, and is now working on the background. In general, a right-handed person shades from top to bottom and from back to front. This prevents the smearing problem that often occurs with graphite. And the good news is that a leftie can work from right to left and not smear either!
Remember I said, “Pick something you love, because you will be looking at it for a long time”? Kirby loves this band called “Slipknot”. It is her fourth drawing with me. She is doing a very careful and thorough job. This is creepy to me, so I mostly help her from across the table, viewing the drawing upside-down. This is a very helpful technique when learning to draw, or even after one knows how to draw. It bypasses the part of your brain that names an item which prevents you from actually seeing, and forces you to see just the sizes, proportions, shapes, angles, etc.
Here is another example of working from a photo. The first step is to decide size and placement; second step is laying out all the pieces with a very light outline. Figuring out how to space the flower petals took some organized thought. This is Maleah’s second drawing with me. Lots of people already draw some before taking lessons; some have never tried it but have always wanted to. People get a little nervous and say “I really don’t know how to draw”. My answer to that is “No need – that’s why you want lessons!” 😎
After drawing one’s hand, the next step is to work from a simple photograph. I ask students to bring in photos, preferably their own. This is because A. there aren’t copyright “issues” (why do I dislike that word so much??) and B. one is familiar with the subject and C. one apparently likes the subject if the trouble was taken to photograph it! I say over and over “Pick something you love, because you will be staring at it for a long time”.
This is Rod’s first pencil drawing. Really! It is a step by step process, and break it down into as many steps as it takes for someone to be able to draw. This includes lots of demonstrating and explaining and practicing on scratch paper.
Learning to draw is about learning to see accurately and learning to handle the tools to depict what is seen. The first lessons are copying exercises, and then we move to drawing one’s own hand. This is how it can look:
All drawings start with the outlining stage. Here, Sara has her outline in place, and has begun to shade. We use a plexiglass viewing window to transform the 3 dimensional hand into 2 dimensions for the outlining process. This makes it easier to see what is really there. (It doesn’t show in this photo.)
The next step in the saga of growing an art business was teaching people how to draw. It has always been a very rewarding challenge to help people learn to see, to break down the process into manageable steps and to spend time with wonderful people that I might never have gotten the chance to know. That grew, and eventually I had to move somewhere that gave me the flexibility to teach more classes. Over time, the list of people wanting to take lessons expanded to 85 people! I had as many as 50 students at one time in classes of 4-5 per hour.
Pencil drawing by S. Brown – private collection
In college, I had an art teacher in a design class or some other esoteric subject who said to me, “Just because you can draw doesn’t make you an artist”. I was devastated, insulted, dismayed, shocked, and any other adjective you can think of for the situation—how dare he say that to me!! Now that I have the advantage of 35+ years life experience and wisdom, I know he was right, even if it was an insensitive and snotty remark.
Drawing is a skill that can be taught, learned, developed and is sometimes just innate. Art has to be something that one learns about, develops over time, and comes about because of a love for the subject. Art can encompass many skills, forms and be useful in many careers.
Drawing is a skill that is useful regardless of one’s career, and it definitely is useful in any art career. One can become an artist without the ability to draw, particularly in this age of multiple tools. A number of years ago, I had an interesting conversation with an art teacher friend. She was teaching her junior high students more than any of my college professors ever taught me—principles, elements, styles and history.
My college professors may have had their Master’s of Fine Arts degrees, but mostly they walked around the room while taking a break from their own work, and offered criticism and snide remarks (“Just because you can draw. . .” or “You need to work on composition”) without ever bothering to actually teach, to demonstrate or share information.
I have been teaching people how to draw for over 30 years. (and that is without an MFA – imagine that!) It is a skill, and in teaching the skill, many other things about art can be shared. We talk about different styles, ways to set up a drawing from the beginning, ways of arranging the elements in a drawing, and lots of technique. (The main thing I ever want to learn is HOW and the second is WHY, so that is what I share with my students.)
Through the years, only a small handful of my students (that I know of) of have pursued art as a career. Everyone that has stayed long enough has learned to draw, and they each have drawings they can proudly show off to prove that they know how to draw.
I couldn’t draw this well in college; growth is the goal of many years of practice.
Drawing lessons were not a waste of time for any of my former or present students. They learn to draw (duh), learn to communicate with people of all ages (that is the way my classes are), explore a type of art in a comfortable environment, develop a bit more confidence, and make new friends.
I enjoy every moment spent with each of my students. We have easy friendships that transcends age and last through time and all its changes. In conclusion, I can draw AND am an artist, so there, you Snotty Professor who are now probably just a retired teacher! But I’m not bitter.
There have been many art teachers in my life, and each one seems to have hard and fast rules. Several colored pencil (CP) teachers have said NEVER USE BLACK. Another CP teacher said, “If you aren’t supposed to use black, why do they manufacture it?” That strikes me as pure (un)common sense.
One CP teacher said to ALWAYS put the darkest color as the bottom layer and work up to the lightest color. Another said ALWAYS start with the lightest color as your base and then add layers in order of increasing darkness. I have done both on the same drawing and gotten the same result!
My best drawing teacher in college only let us draw with a 6B, which is a very soft black pencil. He did not let us smear or blend with any tool, including our fingers. He never told us why this was So Very Important, but now with many years of hindsight, I have this guess: if you could learn to control that one pencil, you could make any pencil do anything you wished it to do. It took me years to be able to use the entire range of pencils available because his idea was so deeply etched into my head. This is a drawing from his class:
Some of the painting teachers I have listened to say “NEVER use white alone”. (What are you supposed to use if that is the color you need??) Most say, “NEVER use black”. At an art show of Very Big Deal Artists, one of the artists I spoke with told me of his layering process and it included black paint!! Go figure.
Many of my students ask me how to hold their pencils. I show them how I hold mine, and tell them to try it, and to try anything that feels comfortable to them. The point is that there are some places in life where there are absolutes, but in art the only absolutes are determined by the results you desire.