Week Two: Lines, Shapes, and Overlapping

I can see that everyone's confidence in drawing has increased a lot. All of you rose to the challenge of overlapping shapes. Placing things in front of other things (overlapping) creates depth of space in your drawing. You also made excellent progress in drawing accurate proportions. Keep comparing the shapes you draw to the picture or object you're looking at. Are the tires too small compared to the body of the truck? Is the dinosaur's body too long compared to its tail?

Overlapping
We got started drawing guidelines of three geometric shapes, then erased lines that put a shape in the foreground and another shape in the background by overlapping, then finished with darker outlines and tones. We learned to use overlapping in the lesson drawings. We'll explore overlapping again in future lessons on space and form. Gage overlaps shapes to create depth in his drawing shown at left.

Warm Ups
Before getting started on the class lesson we spent five minutes on pencil warm ups. As you all know by now, this helps you learn how to grip the pencil and create strokes using your wrist, arm, and shoulder. As always, keep practicing and learning different ways to hold your pencil and keep drawing millions of different kinds of lines. Example at left is Ricky's warm ups.



Outlines and Contour Lines
I really enjoyed your drawings of the picture of the two men by Picasso. Those of you who spent the extra time on this project got an excellent start at drawing the outlines of human figures. When you draw outlines that show the edges and roundness of something, they are called contour lines. Do you see the contour lines in the picture of the two men? We'll learn more about contour lines in future lessons.

I'll post your Picasso drawings with next week's lessons. Some of you didn't put your names on them, so I'll talk with Hilda so I get the proper names on them. I'll post your wonderful comments, too. This comment is from Elvis (his drawing is shown above, right): "Thank you Rob for commenting on my drawings. This is an exciting class and I hope I learn a lot from this class." You're all very welcome! And your questions and comments are welcome, too!

For all you brave sketchers looking for an extra challenge with edges and contour lines, draw the egret in Sketchy's Challenge. Follow Sketchy's helpful tips when drawing this elegant bird. For the challenge click here.

Great progress, SLV Sketchers! Coming up on Friday: Patterns and Texture. Here's some info on Patterns and Texture. Keep Drawing! --Rob