Drawing The Pieces Together

Raku Kilns at the Creative Arts Center

For six weeks we have been focusing on drawing by breaking the practice of drawing down to it's basic elements; contour line, mass, mark making, negative space, relationships, gesture and composition.

For this last class of Drawing Fundamentals, we are taking all those elements and applying them to a larger scale view. This shifting from still life to landscape tends to bring about a regression of drawing skills, but all the drawing elements apply in the same way. The objects in the landscape are the same as the fruit in the still life. Apply the elements to flatten your view of the world, all the objects will become a flat pattern which is transferred onto the page like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Ceramic Class Room

Of course the trick is to stop thinking in 3D. You know the bucket is round, but in a drawing its a rectangle with curved ends.

When drawing landscapes you do need to acknowledgment the horizon line. The line that marks the separation of seeing the tops of objects and seeing the bottoms of objects. In the drawing of the Ceramic Class Room, you can see the tops of the buckets on the floor, but you can't see the tops of the objects on the top shelf.

This horizon line is your grounding straight line. All lines angle off of this line. Angling more as you look higher up or lower down. It tells you what the angle of perspective should be for all the other flat shapes.

Sorry, that's probably more confusing than it is enlightening. That's the nature of perspective. You just have to be there and do it to understand it.

Anyway, This was the last day of class and my last day to teach Drawing Fundaments. A Big Thank you to the Creative Arts Center for this opportunity to fill in while the instructor was recuperating. I really enjoyed the experience of getting back to the fundaments of drawing.

Next week: I'll blog about something new.