Mosaic Patterns

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Welcome to the Weekly Art Action for the week of June 14th!

These art actions are designed to give you something specific to do, related to drawing or nature journalling, to help you build and practice your skills, or maybe learn a new skill along the way.

This week’s art action assignment is to make a random mosaic-like pattern with markers or pencils. A mosaic is when someone takes little tiles and arranges them to make either a picture or a pattern (like a tiled floor). In this case, we’re just drawing a pattern out.

Supplies

paper

markers or pencils or crayons (etc.)

Optional: different kinds of stencils, rulers, or shapes to trace, if you don’t want to draw “freehand”

How do I do it?

The main goal today is really about playing with color and using graphical patterns to make an interesting looking mosaic-like picture. This is a really fun project to do.

There are a couple of different ways to do this.

The first way is to draw in the black lines first. Just start out with a black marker or pencil, and make random (or deliberate) lines all over your paper, crossing over other lines, so that you have lots of small sections all over your paper to color in. Next, select out some colors, and color in your areas.

Be Creative by Esther Eddy (age 10)

Express Yourself by Isobel Eddy (age 10)

The other possibility, which my kids showed me, is to start with your colors, and just draw patterns with your colors all over the paper, as you see above.

Going Forward

This can be a great way to play around with color, and find out what colors work well together and which do not. Try to use this idea to make interesting posters, or designs to hang up.

Share

If you’ve done this lesson, and you’d like to share your results, just post a link to your photo in the comments section. (This is family friendly, so please keep it PG, or it will be deleted! Thanks!) If you don’t have a website or blog of your own, you could upload it to a site like Flickr.com and share with us that way.

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Advanced Gradients

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Welcome to the Weekly Art Action for the week of June 21st!

These art actions are designed to give you something specific to do, related to drawing or nature journalling, to help you build and practice your skills, or maybe learn a new skill along the way.

This week’s art action is about practicing making gradients that have good contrast. This past weekend, I was blessed to be the judge at an art contest at the first Beets, Beats, and Eats of the new year in Ortonville Michigan. This got me thinking quite a bit about what makes art good or bad, and how we judge art. Are there objective ways of looking at, and evaluating art? These questions stirred in my mind in the days leading up to my role as an art judge.

After looking at the different, beautiful works of art, and thinking on this over the last few days following the show, I realized that one of the biggest areas that set apart the good from the flat-out awesome was contrast. Talking with one of the other judges, she agreed with me that the pictures that really made the cut had excellent contrast in them, from 5-8 year old group, all the way up to the adult group.

What is contrast? Contrast is basically the difference between teh light and the dark areas of your picture. A picture with good contrast has some very black dark areas (even if it’s only a thin line) and some very white light areas, even if only in a small highlight. Take some time yourself to flip through a book on art, and you’ll see what I mean.

This art action is going to take you through an exercise in making a shading that goes from very black to white as smoothly as possible.

Supplies

Any kind of paper will work, like a sketchbook or notepad.

a ruler (optional)

Some graphite pencils of different hardnesses. You should have one pencil that is very soft (such as a 6B pencil) and one that is harder (such as a 2H).

A blending stump, or, if you don’t have one, a cotton swab will work but not as well.

How to make a simple gradient

Begin by making a long, thin rectangle on your page.

Start at one end for the darkest possible shade in the gradient, and move towards the other end for the lightest shade, using a medium soft pencil (such as 2B). Work in even strokes, preferably up and down or diagonally, filling in the area except for the very end of the light range.

Go back over and slowly add layers towards the darker end of the gradient, one at a time. If you go outside the lines, you can always erase it.

Using the softest pencil, add a very dark area at the end.

Using a blending stump, blend in your gradient using short, even strokes.

If necessary, use an eraser to add highlights to the lighter end of your gradient.

The Goal

The main goal for this exercise is to help you practice making gradients for the next time you do any kind of a shaded drawing. Work on getting some rich black areas in every drawing, and some very white highlights, as this helps you to have a more visually interesting drawing, and it helps your drawing to look more finished.

Going Forward

This technique can be done using graphite pencil as we’ve done here, but you can use this really in any media — creating water color gradients, colored pencil gradients, chalk gradients, etc. Select one color, and bring it from black, to white, starting with black, moving towards your chosen color shaded with black, to very light tints of your chosen color. This is an excellent warm up exercise which helps remind you to ad the right amount of contrast to your pictures!

Share

If you’ve done this lesson, and you’d like to share your results, just post a link to your photo in the comments section. (This is family friendly, so please keep it PG, or it will be deleted! Thanks!) If you don’t have a website or blog of your own, you could upload it to a site like Flickr.com and share with us that way.

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Watercolor Sunset

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Welcome to the Weekly Art Action for the week of June 14th!

These art actions are designed to give you something specific to do, related to drawing or nature journalling, to help you build and practice your skills, or maybe learn a new skill along the way.

This week’s art action assignment is to carefully look at a sunset, and create a painting with those colors using washes. Watercolors on watercolor paper (or other heavy paper) work best for this.

Supplies

Water color paper (or some other kind of heavier paper, so that it won’t fall apart when waterlogged)

Water

Watercolors & brushes

and…a sunset to look at!

How do I do it?

The main goal today is not so much “drawing something” but rather capturing the color of something. Sunsets tend to have a huge selection of colors and blends of colors going on. Spend some time really looking at a sunset, enjoying the beauty and the colors. Once indoors, select a color pallette. Talk about what colors we saw in the sunset and how they blended together. Most of the time there is blue for the sky, combined with reds and oranges with the sunset, leading to different shades of red, orange, pink, purple, etc. You’ll want either dark green, brown, or black for your ground, if you want to include it.

On your paper, you’ll also want to add some kind of horizon line. The horizon is where the sky meets the ground. Because our main focus is going to be the sunset, my horizon line is going to be close to the ground. You don’t have to draw any ground at all though; just paint the sky.

Here are the steps for making a watercolor sunset.

1. Wet down the paper with a large brush and plain water. You may want to tape down the paper first with masking tape to prevent it from curling up too much. If you are drawing the ground too, keep the area below the horizon line dry to prevent the paint from running into that area.

2. Create a Gradient Wash of Blue for the bulk of the sky. When your paper is already wet, the color will spread really nicely, and gently, across the paper. to make a nicer looking sky, I usually start off darker at the top of my paper, and let it slowly fade towards the horizon line.

3. While the blue is still damp, you can add dabs of the other colors (such as reds and oranges). This will create what is called a Variegated Wash. Because the paper is so wet, the colors will blend more easily.

4. For best results, wait until your sunset is dried before adding detail to the area below your horizon line. This will prevent the area below the horizon from bleeding into the sky too much. Another alternative is to use a black waterproof marker to add sillouttes of objects below the horizon line (such as the tree line).

Going Forward

Watercolor washes are very handy to use in different projects. They are well suited to pretty much anything that doesn’t require great detail (or you can use them as a background before adding more detail later). Try to use varigated washes to see how different colors blend together, and practice drawing Gradient washes for skies and fields.

Share

If you’ve done this lesson, and you’d like to share your results, just post a link to your photo in the comments section. (This is family friendly, so please keep it PG, or it will be deleted! Thanks!) If you don’t have a website or blog of your own, you could upload it to a site like Flickr.com and share with us that way.

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Gesture Drawing: Birds

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Welcome to the Weekly Art Action for the week of May 24th!

These art actions are designed to give you something specific to do, related to drawing or nature journalling, to help you build and practice your skills, or maybe learn a new skill along the way.

This week’s art action assignment is to do some gesture drawings of birds you see. These can be birds flying, or birds on an electrical wire, or at the feeder. You can use whatever media you want to use to do this. Birds have a fairly simple shape, and don’t sit still too long, so they are great for practicing our gesture sketching techniques.

Supplies

Any kind of paper will work, like a sketchbook or notepad.

A pencil, or some kind crayon or some kind of woodless pencil, such as what I used: Prismacolor Art Stix . The idea is to draw loosely and to draw large, and a pencil may make it too tempting to draw tightly and to erase.

How do I do it?

Follow the instructions in the gesture drawing lesson I did several months ago here.

Try to draw as quickly as you can, getting as much of the shape, basic shading, and other basic information down on paper as quickly as possible. The idea behind a gesture drawing is so that you can go back and use it to make a more complete drawing later. You are only getting as much down as quickly as possible before the subject flies away! Gesture drawings are important when sketching in nature because nature often doesn’t sit still for long.

Keep it loose, work fast, and have fun!

Going Forward

This is a fun activity to do any time. For example, a few weeks ago, I had to wait in the parking lot for someone, and saw tons of sea gulls flying around overhead. All I had with me was one prismacolor black art stix, because I had used it in the first grade art class I taught earlier that day (I like how dark and bold the lines are, when teaching first graders how to draw simple contours). I sketched these black colored sea gulls as they sat on the lines overhead and flew around, hoping someone would throw them some food, no doubt.

A page of sketches I did in my car of birds in a parking lot, mostly sea gulls

A detail of sea gulls flying overhead, in prismacolor art stix (black)

A detail of the smaller birds (nuthatches, I believe) on the wire overhead

Share

If you’ve done this lesson, and you’d like to share your results, just post a link to your photo in the comments section. (This is family friendly, so please keep it PG, or it will be deleted! Thanks!) If you don’t have a website or blog of your own, you could upload it to a site like Flickr.com and share with us that way.

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Posted in Learning to Sketch, Nature Study, Sketching Techniques, Technique of the Week | Comments (0)

Observational Drawing: Salt and Pepper Shakers

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Welcome to the Weekly Art Action for the week of May 10th!

These art actions are designed to give you something specific to do, related to drawing or nature journalling, to help you build and practice your skills, or maybe learn a new skill along the way.

This week’s art action assignment is to sketch your salt and pepper shakers. You can use whatever media you want to use to do this. The main thing to focus on is to really look at your salt and pepper shakers, and draw them from observation. Salt and pepper shakers are usually simple shapes, and as such, they are good for practicing our skills on something most of us has laying around, without it being too complex.

Supplies

Any kind of paper will work, like a sketchbook or notepad.

A 4H (or other “H” graphite pencil) to lightly sketch the picture.

Any other kind of pencils such as colored pencils or regular HB (#2) pencils, and an eraser. You may also need a drawing stump in order to blend in your shading with a regular pencil.

How do I do it?

Start off by really looking at your salt and pepper shakers. Take some time to let your eye go along the shape of the object. Try to see if you can pick out the different shapes use in a salt and pepper shaker. Plan how you will draw them. Also, take some time to think about your background. Are you going to color it or shade it or leave it blank?

Next, very lightly start sketching your salt and pepper shakers on the paper.

Shade them as needed

…and keep working on them until you have them just as you want them to look.

For variety, try to sketch them using the different techniques we’ve learned here, such as Grissaille, making a Blind Contour Drawing, creating a Gesture Drawing, or a regular Contour Drawing.

The Goal

The main goal for this exercise is to practice your sketching techniques using a very simple set of objects you’ll find around your house.

Going Forward

For variety, try to sketch them using the different techniques we’ve learned here, such as Grissaille, making a Blind Contour Drawing, creating a Gesture Drawing, or a regular Contour Drawing.

Share

If you’ve done this lesson, and you’d like to share your results, just post a link to your photo in the comments section. (This is family friendly, so please keep it PG, or it will be deleted! Thanks!) If you don’t have a website or blog of your own, you could upload it to a site like Flickr.com and share with us that way.

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Grisaille with Colored Pencils

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Welcome to the Weekly Art Action for the week of May 3rd!

These art actions are designed to give you something specific to do, related to drawing or nature journalling, to help you build and practice your skills, or maybe learn a new skill along the way.

This week’s art action is all about a colored pencil technique known as “grisaille”. You can actually use grisaille (gris = gray in French) with pretty much any medium (paints, pencils, chalks, etc.), though I find it works especially well with pencil. I frequently get emails from readers who ask me to explain how to draw with colored pencils in a nutshell. Well, I am not sure that you really can “nutshell” colored pencils, but grisaille comes close. It should give you a good foundation. My newest drawing DVD, Super Simple Nature Sketching for Early Spring demonstrates this technique over and over again, in 6 different pictures.

Sometimes grisaille refers to a monochrome (black and white) picture, but it can also refer to starting with a black and white shaded drawing, and adding color over the top of it, as we will be doing here.

Supplies

Any kind of paper will work, like a sketchbook or notepad.

A 4H (or other “H” graphite pencil) to lightly sketch the picture.

A set of colored pencils, preferably some with a softer lead (such as Prismacolor Premier), including at least one black colored pencil, and, if possible, a couple of shades of gray. Prismacolor pencils can be purchased individually at most art supply stores, so if you have a set of other colored pencils that doesn’t include gray, you may find some individual grays at the store.

How do you work with grisaille with colored pencils?

Start with a simple contour sketch of something, such as a ball, a coffee mug, or something else simple to practice on.

Look carefully at the object you’ve sketched. Where are the shadows?

Using the black (and the different levels of gray, if you have some), add the shading. If you are using gray scale pencils, start with the lightest gray, and go to the darkest. If you are just using black, draw lightly for the lighter shades and use cross hatching, or darker shading to add your darker shades.

After you have gotten a very good looking black and white drawing, with your shading looking good, go over the top of the drawing with your colored pencils.

Always draw your lines/shading with the flow of your subject. :-)

The Goal

The main goal for drawing with a grisaille technique is to create a black and white shaded picture that looks nearly complete before you move on to adding color, so that the shading blends in as you add your color.

Going Forward

When quickly sketching something in a nature journal, you may not be able to complete a “perfect” monochrome grisaille under drawing first, but sketching and shading in black or gray before adding color will still help your colored pencil drawings to look better.

I don’t recommend sketching with just the black colored pencil though, as it doesn’t erase as easily as a graphite pencil.

Share

If you’ve done this lesson, and you’d like to share your results, just post a link to your photo in the comments section. (This is family friendly, so please keep it PG, or it will be deleted! Thanks!) If you don’t have a website or blog of your own, you could upload it to a site like Flickr.com and share with us that way.

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Steps to Observational Drawing

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Yesterday, I mentioned that Observation was the most important skill in sketching, especially sketching in nature. The question was asked, via email, how to develop those observational skills. Is there something in particular we should look for when we are observing before drawing?

First of all, decide what your subject is, and focus in on that. I think it’s best to understand it this way: you can’t focus in on 20 things at once, or each of those will look distorted in the final picture. When you are taking a photograph with a camera, the camera can only focus on one thing. There needs to be a subject, a main focal point in your picture. Decide first what that is. Maybe it’s a snowman (as this month’s drawing lesson will feature) or a rabbit, or a flower. We’ll look at what is going on around our subject, too, but we need to first decide what our subject is.

Here are some general tips that I look for when observing nature for the purposes of sketching:

1. Light

Pay attention to the light as it hits your subject. What direction is the light coming from? Is the light hard and bright, or softer? Note where the shadows are. Notice where shadows form on your subject, and where the light creates highlights. A good example of this would be a very shiny red apple. Take some time to look at one, and you’ll see areas of shadow, and areas of highlight. What does light do on the surface of your subject? Is it reflecting back, or does it simply make the area brighter?

2. Shapes

Often, we draw by using light guidelines to start. Using some basic shapes (squares, circles, rectangles, ovals, curves, lines…) we can create some general guidelines to help us lay out our picture, before going back and adding more detail. Look at your subject. What shapes do you see under the surface? Sometimes it’s easier to see shapes in some objects than others. For example, a snowman is usually three circles and then a triangular shaped carrot nose. Pretty simple, right? After drawing those guidelines, we are able to go in and fill in more detail, but the simple shape guidelines help me get most of my picture down before I start getting too bogged down with details early on.

3. Textures

What kind of textures do you see in your picture and on your subject? Short fur, long fur? Scales? Reptile skin? Bumpy leaves or smooth, waxy leaves? Soft pussywillows or thorny rose branches?

4. Colors

What colors do you see? Don’t just look and say, “That’s a carrot; it must be orange.” Look closer. What do you see? What shades of orange, yellow, brown, and gray do you notice on the carrot? Pay attention to the subtle differences in color on a subject. For example, I just sketched a rabbit, and one thing I notice when I look carefully at this one rabbit in my yard is that he seems to have a gray undercoat, with some white in it too, and brown fur over that fluffy gray/white undercoat, with some black. When I first look at him though, I see a brown bunny with a white tail. When I take a closer look, I notice all of these different colors and how they work together. The light also affects how the colors look too, of course.

Also, notice how the colors of things around your subject are affecting the color of your subject. Sometimes, color from other objects will reflect up onto the subject very subtly.If a girl is wearing a red blouse, sometimes the underside of her chin will look slightly reddish, from the color of the blouse.

5. Setting

While we’re mostly focusing in on our subject instead of letting ourselves be distracted by trying to focus on too many things at once, we should notice the setting we’ve found our subject in, too. When a rabbit is in the snow, can you see all of it? Does the snowman sit perfectly on the top of the snow too? Probably not. look at how those things around the subject affect it.

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Quick Gesture Drawings for Sketching

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A few days ago, I talked about the importance of observation in drawing and nature study, and then, in another post, we discussed the general steps for observing nature before drawing it. I’ll say it again: most of drawing from nature starts with really looking and observing nature. Look closely first before you ever pick up your pencil.

But, how do you get started after you have taken a good long look?

This is where a technique called gesture drawing comes in. Sometimes we call this a quick gesture or a quick sketch.

What is gesture drawing? Well, it’s not making a complete drawing, start to finish, worthy to be hung up in a gallery or shown to all of your friends. I’m almost embarrassed as I photographed some gesture drawings I did recently to show you. A gesture is a very quick study of a subject, where we focus on getting as much information down on the paper in a short amount of time. This is very useful to record the essential things we observed in those steps to observation, such as….

  • What direction is the light coming from and where are the darkest shadows?
  • Where are the highlights (where light is reflecting or showing up as bright white)?
  • What is the general shape of the object?
  • What position is the subject in?

This last one is really crucial when you are sketching an animal. Animals rarely stay in one position long enough to do a portrait of them. They move around way too much. If you have house animals like cats or dogs, usually you can practice on them, especially when they are sleeping. You’ll soon notice, though, animals rarely even stay still when sleeping (exception: cats on a cold day, lying in front of the furnace register look nearly dead).

As I said, the idea behind gesture drawing is to get as much info down in your sketchbook in a short amount of time, NOT to create a thorough or accurate drawing. The best part of a gesture drawing is capturing the “big picture” instead of focusing on a small area of detail. By getting enough information down about what you’re interested in drawing, you can later go back in and do a more accurate, detailed drawing, long after your subject has moved on. If you start with drawing, for example “the perfect eyes”, you’ll need to stop long before you get anywhere else in your picture, because few humans or animals will stay still that long. In cold weather, you’ll also not be able to sketch outside for that long either. Gesture drawings are especially useful when you are creating a sketch of an animal. This is handy because nature rarely stops to pose for you. Even if nature does pose a little bit, animals generally won’t stand still long enough for us to create a completed drawing, start to finish. We need to get as much information as quickly as possible, first through observation, and secondly through a series of quick gesture drawings.

Samples of gesture sketches from my sketchbook, showing my housecat and a backyard rabbit

These gestures capture the pose of the animals I was looking at, as well as something of the lighting. They allowed me to make more detailed drawings later.

As you can see from this page from my sketchbook, I was doing a few sketches of my cat in the kitchen (he likes it when I draw him), when I noticed the rabbit out the window, so I stopped to sketch the rabbit in the snow. I later used these gesture drawings of the rabbit to create a more detailed drawing of a rabbit, which I used in the January Snowman DVD. In my gesture drawing, you can’t see the rabbit looking at the snowman (I had sketched my snowman a few days earlier — by the time I was sketching the rabbit, the snowman had partly melted already. I observed the rabbit looking up curiously at the snowman, and sketched just the rabbit this time around.

I mention this in the DVD, but this particular rabbit in our back yard is almost a little too tame. We have about a dozen rabbits in our yard, but this one, with these markings, has gotten very close to me at times. Once, I was weeding my herb garden, when I realized it was inching towards me, sniffing. On the one hand, I wanted to reach out and pet it. On the other, I know that wild animals are just that — wild. They can be unpredictable, and if they become too tame, it can be dangerous for them. When wild animals lose their natural fear of humans, they are more susceptible to being injured or killed by cars, people, or domestic animals, and they could spread disease more easily to humans.

By the way…another tanget here, but if you ever find a nest of bunnies with seemingly no mother around, that is perfectly normal. Don’t disturb it. Don’t touch the bunnies. Mother rabbits often stay away from the nest for long periods of time. Baby bunnies do not have good survival rates if you decided to make them into your pets, so don’t! For more information on this, see this website about baby bunnies. It’s also a good idea, if you live semi-rural, to check your yard for bunny nests before you mow for the first time in the spring. They usually put a bunch of fur, straw, and debris in a low spot in your lawn, and cover it with more debris after the babies are born. We have one spot that the rabbits all seem to like for nests, and it’s in the middle of my yard. I actually planted a rose bush near it (Which oddly didn’t upset the rabbit in the least) just to make sure I didn’t  mow there. It goes without saying that I try to keep the housepets away from that area. Bunnies don’t have a scent, so unless YOU go over there, nothing will alert  your house pets to its location.

Rabbits in your back yard are also great for drawing though if they haven’t yet seen you out there watching them. Work quickly, getting the shape and the shadows down on the paper, and worry about the details later. Each of these sketches took less than 30 seconds each.

When I was taking a drawing class in college, we used to do a series of gesture portraits, where the teacher had a timer, and every minute the live model changed position. This is also a good exercise in learning to focus more on the general shape than creating an “exact likeness” of the subject. If you have a houseful, let different kids take turns modeling…and every minute, strike a different pose. It’s great practice for real life observational drawing! Cats, dogs, and rabbits in the backyard do this naturally, if less predictably.

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