Week One: Lines, Shapes, Proportions, Composition

Okay, Santa Cruz Mountains Sketchers! It was so nice to meet all of you. I couldn't ask for a better group of sketchers! And the Art Center is the perfect facility for our sketch sessions. Everyone is off to a terrific start in drawing from observation and imagination.

All of you jumped in and learned to hold the pencil on its side (overhand grip) while moving your whole arm as you sketch. You focused on drawing with curved and angled lines, overlapping shapes to create depth, and using patterns to indicate texture. The emphasis of the first half of the evening was to get 'sketchy', see the relationships between shapes, and to draw accurate proportions.


Pencil warm-up by Allison

Then we cranked up the music, dropped into the zone and created a large-format abstract/surrealist drawing. Everyone really enjoyed using lines and shapes from the lesson drawings while experimenting with 2B, 4B, 6B pencils and 6B and 8B woodless graphite pencils.

If you have time this week...

Here's a drawing challenge for you to do for Thursday (it's not mandatory): Getting Abstract

Scroll down to see your work, and don't forget to click on the images to enlarge for viewing. Feel free to add your comments to the drawings.

See you Thursday evening. --Rob