Since 1994 I have been teaching people how to draw. We don’t go outside and sketch. We sit inside and work from photos. We learn to break a complex photo into its basic shapes, how to start a drawing, to get all the shapes and proportions right, how to shade so that it appears 3 dimensional and how to finish it off to be the best possible.
I have about 20 students, ranging in age from 13 to Too-Polite-To-Ask.
Everyone works at his own pace on the subject of his own choosing. We generally don’t doggedly copy photos but do some well-thought-out cropping, and in general just clean up the mess that real life consists of.
I encourage everyone to work from her own photos rather than things from calendars, magazines and the internet. Not everyone has a good camera or a backlog of photos, and often I will lend photos to my students.
Usually each person has an idea of what he wants to draw.
The main thing is this: PICK SOMETHING YOU LOVE BECAUSE YOU WILL BE STARING AT IT FOR A VERY LONG TIME.
This is a grandson with a stuffed lion. Definitely a much loved subject!We have spent a great deal of time evaluating exactly what we are seeing here. That is one of the drawbacks of working from a photo taken by someone else.I warned him and warned him about the slowness of colored pencil, but he proceeded anyway. Just getting the gradation of blues, and getting it smooth, is taking F O R E V E R. That’s okay – we don’t have any deadlines.A perfectionistic animal lover is doing a fabulous job on this challenging conglomerate of squishy shapes and elusive textures.Stunning! Simply stunning. This is by a woman who began lessons about 9 years ago so that her watercolor paintings would be more accurate. She mastered graphite quickly and has been showing off with colored pencil ever since. She doesn’t need lessons any more, but I am ever so grateful that she continues to show up each week.No faces smaller than an egg! Sometimes my students are determined. So, I help them the best I can and we all learn. Those who are looking on in horror become determined to never draw a face smaller than an egg. What a challenge!Turned my back to help the other students for awhile and BOOM! FInal leaf, done. There’s a very dark background coming. . . that ought to slow her down a bit. Or not.The idea with this is to do one of the blossoms in color. That is one of my favorite ways to use color, and this is turning out beautifully.
