Drawing 1 class - still life - perspective

We continue to have an awesome Drawing 1 class. Previously we were working with proportions and using our drawing tools to describe textures and shading on still life objects brought in and arranged by the students.

Each student drew a minimum of 3 items arranged into a pleasant composition. Who know a shoe could be so beautiful :D

If you get the drawing done right, with proper proportions, adding shading and texture, and in future painting, should fall right into place. If not, even globs of paint won't help you repair it.

This past week, we began our technical exploration of all things dimensional. We start with basic shapes, square, circle triangle and learn how the use of line and shading can transform them into dimensional objects like a cube, pyramid, cone and cylinder. We expand to the 5 platonic solids, which are all congruent, regular polygons, I add the 4th dimensional Tesseract and try to draw it graphically, for fun.

I demonstrate how orthographic drawings are used by engineers etc. to turn information into isometric projections. We see isometric images everyday from ikea instructions, to video games and lego instructions.  Even though this type of drawing is not entirely realistic it begins us on the pursuit of drawing 3 dimensional looking forms on a 2 dimensional surface. Next we move into perspective.

I get the students to draw a landscape and an interior using one point perspective.  A great use of one point perspective in film is Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey. Example below.