An extra curricular drawing project

As well as teaching with the OCA, I also run a couple of evening classes at my local arts centre. If I find that a particular exercise I do with these groups works well, I thought perhaps I could share it with you and you could choose whether to take it up or not as a piece of additional work. It would not represent part of your final course work but may well provide food for thought for your log book and can also be included in your sketchbook.
As I am still experimenting with the blog I will post the exercise without the images for now and go back and have a stab at adding them later.

A beginners drawing project
This exercise is about getting used to pencils and exploring their potential by pushing yourself to make a variety of marks and use the pencil in different ways. Developing a sensitivity to your materials and expanding your repertoire of marks is vitally important.
1. You will need a piece of black card and a piece of white card. Spend 15 minutes or less shaping the piece of white card into an interesting shape. Use scissors and tape or a stapler. Don’t spend a long time constructing anything intricate. You could twist the card into a spiral and cut into it a little. You could make a couple of pleats in it and fan it out. Below are examples of pieces made by other students.
















2. Place your sculpture onto the black card. Light it by a directional light; a spot light or a window. Make sure that you have some nice easy to identify shadow shapes. Make sure that you are interested in the view you have. Don’t be passive – you are in charge. Don’t land yourself with a boring or difficult image.

3. Use an easel or rig something up so that you can put a piece of paper on a board. Have it upright so that you can see your object and look at your drawing without having to peer round your board or look up. You should ideally be able to see both your drawing and your subject simply by moving your eyes. Decide whether you will use your paper in landscape or portrait format. That decision will be affected by what you are looking at – is the view long or wide or can you make an interesting composition by selecting one or the other.

4. Make sure too that you are looking at your object exactly as you wish to draw it. This may seem obvious but it is surprising how often students stand above an object and then attempt to draw the object from the front. You are going to be trying to record what you see so make sure you can see exactly what you want to record! If you are standing at an easel that means you will need to construct a plinth or put a box on a table or something to get the height.

5. You are now looking at a white object on a black background and the white object has shadows which go from pale grey to very dark grey, perhaps even black. If that is not the case, put a couple more folds or holes in your object.

6. IMPORTANT Spend the first 20 minutes at least (a long time!) simply pushing your pencil around to fill in the black area which will be quite a proportion of your drawing, leaving a patch in the middle where your white object will eventually be. I notice when I look at students that they tend to hold their pencil much closer to the point than I do. I hold my pencil about two thirds up the shaft, way back from the business end. Change every aspect of the act of using the pencil as you cover your paper. Hold the pencil at different positions; make dots, dashes, spirals of different weights. Use the side of the lead. Make jerky lines and smooth shading. You will be weaving these marks until you have a kind of wire wool weave of marks to create the smooth black surface, with some differences if there are shadows or highlights on the black card.
















7. Begin work on the white object once it feels right to do so. You can decide whether to contrast the drawing of the white object to its background by drawing it with quite a smooth homogenous mark or to continue with a range of marks. I seem to spend a lot of time repeating myself about the dangers of over reliance on outlines and underestimating the importance of the shapes of shadows and highlights but it bears repeating. Please do not just add some generic shading here and there. Your job here is to translate what you see in three dimensions onto a two dimensional surface. You can see this three dimensional object because light is falling on it and that, coupled with your being alive, means that this is a dynamic image; it is constantly changing and you need to try to convey that energy and history if you want to make a strong believable drawing. Outlines do not exist. They represent the point at which something disappears from view. Drawing round something with an outline immediately flattens it. If you do need to draw bits of outline, then you can get rid of them by shading up to them so that they blend into whichever surface is darker at the point where the boundary line occurs. In your drawing here then, boundary lines on the outside edge of your white object could be blended into the black paper and disappear. There is no rule about this and many expressive drawings can be made using outlines – just not right now.

















8. Model your object by mapping the tones. The shapes of the shadows are as important, in fact more important, than the shape of the object. You are constructing an image by working out which bits are lighter than which and which bits are darker. You are looking to make relative distinctions like ‘if that reaches there then that means that will stop there’ or ‘if the curve ends at the fold, then the fold must reach the triangle’. You need to use all the information available to you and you need to concentrate really hard. Focus your mind, don’t drift and sketch. Spend much more time looking at your object than you do looking at your drawing. Do not try to shoehorn the information into what you think should be there. Try to give your eyes full control and allow unlikely things to happen then keep making changes until they come right. Please remember to use your rubber as often as you use your pencil. It should be the white to your pencil’s black.

Here are some examples of work done by students at my evening class who were given this brief to work with. Remember that I was there the whole time breathing down their necks to make sure they were looking hard and continuing to make changes right up to the last minute.