9/19/14- Basic Drawing

Today's Class-  Today the class did a series of portfolio exercises as part of our study of line.  Last week we dealt with the contour lines that defined the positive shape of the shoes.  Today we started with an exercise related to gesture/reductive drawing, then moved on to the idea of negative space.  All space in a two dimensional work is either positive or negative, and the two are equally important in a drawing.

How to make this up-  There are 3 portfolio exercises to be done.  The gesture/reductive exercise involved drawing from plants, in today's case some flexible bamboo shoots.  The second exercise had students drawing all the negative spaces in an old wooden chair.  The third exercise let the students go back to drawing positive shapes (bottles as in the above student drawing) but using the concept of negative space to help find the shapes of the bottles.  Specific directions for these exercises and some student examples can be found here.

These are portfolio exercises and must be made up by the midterm portfolio grading to receive full credit.

Homework- Gather 4 bottles of similar size (four wine bottles, four soda bottles, four perfume bottles, etc) and place on a table top, near each other but not actually touching.  Using the pencil of your choice do a sketch of the still life on a page in your small sketchbook, paying attention to the sizes, shapes, and spaces between the bottles.  Then without touching the bottles, move to a different position and draw the set up again on a page in your sketchbook.  Repeat this two more times, so that you will have four pages of sketches, each with four bottles.  (alternative option- have the bottles on a tray, and then rotate the tray each time, so that they maintain their relative position to each other while you see it differently each time) 

For next class 9/26/14- We will continue with line, dealing with the idea of perspective, or how things of different shapes look to the artist based on their relative positions, and how we can use line to make this clear to the viewer. Bring your 18" x 24" pad, pencils, and eraser.