9/18/15 Basic Drawing

Today's Class- Today was our first real day of drawing and we opened with the most basic unit of drawing, the line.  We talked about some of the various functions and aspects of line, and my plan was to show a few dozen slides of line based art through history to demonstrate some of these, but the slides were left at home, so I walked around with an art history textbook to show a few key things, then we went right into the drawing exercises, all related to contour line.

How to make this up- Contour lines are the lines that surround a shape (positive space) and separate it from the negative space around it.  We used shoes as the subject for these portfolio exercises.  Shoes are designed to fit on a part of the human body and have many characteristics in common with figures, making them ideal for this kind of practice.  Students were asked to use paper from their 18" x 24" pad and the pencils of their choice, putting as many shoes on one page as they wanted.  The list of specific exercises and photos of student examples from previous semesters can be found here.  

These are portfolio exercises, that can be made up for full credit any time before the midterm portfolio grading in week 8.  I do recommend doing it sooner rather than later, as the lesson leads into everything else we do this semester.

Homework-  We're going to continue shoe based exercises with contour lines.  Use your small sketchbooks and the pencil of your choice.  You will draw 10 pages of shoes, one shoe per page,  at a scale that mostly fills the page.  Use line only- no shading. Reflecting what we did in class today, do the following drawings-

8 pages of exterior contour line only (the silhouette)
1 page of cross contour
1 page of finished line drawing in full detail

For next class 9/25/15- We will continue with line, including exercises involving gesture and negative space.  Bring your 18" x 24" pad, pencils, and eraser. I'll provide the subjects.