Sunday, May 7, 2023

100 Days of Drawing (Week 4)

Elements of Visual Art

An element is an essential ingredient that is used to make up more complex things. In art you normally start off with a line.  By putting various lines together you can create a shape. By adding value, that is shading, to your shape you create form.  By placing forms and shapes in configurations where they overlap and have different sizes, you create space.
(Links above are to Art fundamentals: theory and practice  by Otto G Ocvirk, Robert E Stinson, Philip R Wigg, Robert O Bone, David L Cayton.)

In the first four weeks we've been working with Line, Shape, Value, and Form. We have also touched on Space but will address it more formally when we start learning how to incorporate perspective in the next couple of weeks.

This week's drawings

This week I'll start our lessons on Color by introducing the primary colors.

I've also included an introduction to Texture this week.

Materials:
  • pencil
  • eraser
  • paper (printer paper, notebook, etc)
  • pen
  • colors (colored pencils, crayons, watercolor, etc)
  • alternatives to the above: smart phone or tablet drawing app

Day 23: the lilly


Lesson 14 starts on page 123 of Mark Kistler's you can draw in 30 days.  He uses gentle S curves and tapering lines to create the lovely lilly.

Mark suggests looking at the flowers in Graeme Base's Animalia. Luckily it's available in Internet Archives. Graeme is quite creative and I think that his Uno's Garden has more interesting plants to enjoy. His The Eleventh Hour: a curious mystery provides a visual carnival ride for your amusement.

Mark also recommends Michel Gagné's work. His The Saga of Rex is available in the Internet Archives.

From Arcu's Art World: How to Draw Calla Lillies: Day 14. 


Day 24: advanced-level houses


Lesson 13 starts on page 117 of Mark Kistler's you can draw in 30 days. Mark leads you through the process of drawing an courtyard-style house (L shaped).

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Day 25: contour tubes


Lesson 15 starts on page 129 of Mark Kistler's you can draw in 30 days . Drawing a line for the base, a foreshortened circle for the opening, a line for the top, and a curve for the end you create a elongated shape. You then add contours (curved lines) along the tube to turn the shape into a form and create the illusion of a tube.



Day 26: the wave


Mark continues his use of the tube to teach you how to draw a wave. See Lesson 16 starting on page 137 of  Mark Kistler's you can draw in 30 days for his step-by-step tutorial.

Here are two video tutorials:
For my drawing, I used Jeremy Bishop's Sea Spray and Waves, a photo he shared on Unsplash.


Day 27: body


I tried to draw a body from imagination and decided I needed to do some practice exercises first.  Luckily Burne Hogarth has addressed figure invention in Dynamic Figure Drawing. Burne's drawing style is advanced, but you can simplify it as needed to make it work. For example, use stick figures to study how the body joints work, or use a  manikin to do your study. Here are links to get you started working with a manikin:
Leonardo Pereznieto has two videos I recommend.  In How to Draw the Figure from Imagination Part 1  (11 minutes, 5.2M views) Leonardo demonstrates using an enhanced stick figure (a stick figure with rib cage and pelvic) to sketch figures in various poses. He choses one of the poses to draw to completion.

In How to Draw the Figure from Imagination Part 2  (14 minutes, 1.3M views), Leonardo draws 7 poses started with the enhanced stick figure and adding muscles and flesh to complete each.


Day 28: primary colors


In drawing we use graphite or charcoal or chalk or ink to make marks on paper. Eventually we learn to use a brush loaded with pigmented liquid to make our marks. In a sense, making marks on paper is made by leaving trails of pigment or splashes of pigment soup.  Traditional Art Color Theory is about how these pigments mix to make colors. The primary colors are the ones that are mixed to make the other colors. They are Red, Yellow, and Blue.  Sometimes you'll see an acronym for them: RYB.

I'm listening to a book about Livingstone's search for the source of the Nile. Most of the Nile's water comes from the Blue Nile which got me to think about rivers that are 'primary colors': Red River in New Mexico, Yellow River in China, and the Blue Nile in Africa.  This was leading me to do a cartoon of the three rivers,  but since yesterday was the running of the Kentucky Derby, I decided to do a primary color design honoring the fastest horse ever to race in the Derby : )


Day 29: texture


As you know,  Form is a word that we use to name the visual illusion of three dimensions our drawings create on a two dimensional surface. Texture is the name we use for the tactile illusion we create with our drawings. We encourage our viewers to run the fingers in their eyes along the surfaces we draw. Using a smooth line of ink, we can create a smooth surface; using charcoal, we can create a rough surface. 

For our drawing today let's try to create the following surfaces:
  • smooth
  • rough
  • soft
  • hard
  • sticky 
And here are four video tutorials for drawing texture using various media:

Our focus here has been how to create the illusion of texture.  Further down the road we'll learn techniques for creating texture in your art.  3 easy ways to add watercolor textures to your painting gives you a 30 second glimpse of what I'm talking about.


Day 30: the head


When I first learned to draw human heads, I remembered that the ears extended from the eyebrows to the bottom of the nose.  I also remembered that the eyes are the width of the nose and start even with the wings of the nostrils. The Loomis Method that Proko walks you through will give you guidance for creating more human-like faces.






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