EXPLORE YOUR NATURAL STYLE
Draw the best drawing ever. Use your natural approach and play to your strengths. Don’t hold any ideas in your head, just do what you naturally do. Let’s try to be really focused and not check cell phones at all— this is 45 minutes. Make sure to choose your spot in the studio and find something you would really like to draw.
2) Share your drawing
Share your drawing with the class and give it a positive presentation. Talk about everything you did well, what is working great, and what you like about the drawing. Talk about your personal style, your sense of self expression, and give examples of it in the drawing. How can you tell this is a drawing by you?
3) Criticize your drawing
privately write a list of six items addressing the following things. Try to find out what is wrong with your drawing.
- LINE: Is the drawing overly dependent on line? Does it use only line? Are all the lines the same?
- VALUE: Does the value tell a story? Is the color of the paper ignored? Does the value tell us where to focus? Is there a sense of light?
- COMPOSITION: Is the drawing purposefully composed or is it just random? Is the shape of the paper accounted for or is the drawing just kind of floating in the middle?
- POSITION: Do things get squished towards the top and bottom of the page? Do the proportions of things make sense? Do relative sizes make sense? Are things the right size?
- CROSS CONTOUR: Do my objects have an outer surface or just an outline? Is there a sense of different feelings and different textures on the outer surface of objects or are they all the same?
- PERSPECTIVE: Is everything I drew just flat on the bottom? Can I see less of surfaces near eye level and more of them when they are below or above?
Reference Artist: Tomer Hanuka
http://tropicaltoxic.blogspot.com/2009/04/sometimes-it-takes-village-or-rather.html
Tomer Hanuka often does hundreds of thumbnails for any project. I’ll place one of the images from the above link so that you can take a closer look. For some reason you can’t zoom in on the images in blogspot:
Notice different thumbnails serve different purposes for Hanuka. The first grid are concepts. The next ones are composition studies. Hanuka moves on from composition to larger perspective studies, then gets another idea and goes back to the smaller thumbnails, essentially starting over. Finally he chooses one concept from the new set of thumbnails, then develops the composition and figure again, and finally works through the perspective.
Let’s create a simple formula we can use:
Let’s take six different approaches to drawing and run through them as thumbnail studies, before we even begin to draw. Get a new spot in the studio and divide your page into six panels. Arrange the panels like so:
Work through these six thumbnails and as many more as you like before you start drawing. You could do several for each category or you can add things like:
MASS
NEGATIVE SPACE
HIGH-KEY
LOW-KEY
You can add emotional or story telling ideas as well if you can think of them:
DARK BACKGROUND WITH ONE LIGHT OBJECT
NERVOUS LINES WITH ONE CALM OBJECT
EVERYTHING IS LINE BUT ONE THING IS VALUE
EVERYTHING IS IN LINEAR PERSPECTIVE BUT ONE THING IS FLAT
Tear out your thumbnails and set them somewhere you can reference them while drawing. Try to explore things not found in your natural style.
Now start your longer composition (45 minutes)
