What To Bring To Class On September 9

1. Your homework completed, fixed, and ready to turn in.

2. 18"x24" WHITE bond paper.

3. 4B and 6B GRAPHITE drawing pencils.

4. Your drawing board, yardstick, and eraser.

5. A roll of artist's tape if you have it (I'll have some in the studio).

6. A positive attitude and a willingness to work (I know how much you all LOVE drawing white cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders).

We'll be working on 2-point perspective Wednesday, which is a bit closer to the way our eyes see the world than 1-point, so these drawings will be a bit more accurate to what your looking at. Therefore, I'll expect a bit more true-to-life proportions between objects.

Some of My Own Work

It occured to me that if I'm contantly pushing you guys to show me more line variation, the least I could do is show you some of my own drawings so as to let you see that I practice what I preach. Again, I'm a mostly figurative artist, but examine (and, hell, even critique if you want) my own use of line variation and for what purposes. Click HERE for a gallery of my drawings.

How To Behave At a Gallery

Here's a little something I found that I thought everyone might find funny.

How To Behave At a Gallery on Howcast

Stuff To Do On Labor Day

There are no classes on Monday due to the Labor Day holiday. Many of you may be planning to go home and visit your families. However, I know there are many of you, as well, who will be staying put for budgetary reasons. For those of you who are sticking around, I found some stuff you could check out on that day or over the weekend.

1. The Chick-fil-A Labor Day Giveaway

Apparently, on Labor Day, if you wear your favorite sports team logo to Chick-fil-A between 10:30 AM and closing, you can get a FREE Chick-fil-A Original Chicken Sandwich.

Nearest locations: Oak Court Mall and Poplar Avenue FSU.

2. The Delta Fair and Music Festival

-September 4-13, 2008

Admission is $8.00 for adults and $5.00 for kids.

The Delta Fair and Music Festival is the first big fair/festival of the season. The fair consists of rides, food, live music, and exhibits.

3. Memphis Music & Heritage Festival

September 5-6, 2009

Admission is FREE!

Downtown Memphis, 11AM-11PM each day.

Examples of One-point Perspective Interiors

Click HERE for a gallery of one-point perspective interiors by past Drawing 1 classes.

Schiele, Ingres, and Smith

Here are a few examples from each of the three artists I asked you guys to look at. Don't depend purely on what I'm providing you here, though. Go out and find images from these guys on your own and study what they're doing with their use of line variation.

Egon Schiele

Schiele was a master of line and using it to define form. In each of these examples, you will notice that he's used washes of color in places, but no shading. He didn't seem to be interested in that. Look at how he is using line variations to define the form of what he is drawing, as well as pushing and pulling parts of the figures backward and forward in space. In the top example, notice that hard, dark line that separates the two figures? Contrast that with the thin, wispy lines that define the dress worn by the lower figure.

Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres

What do you notice about the way Ingres uses line in these portraits to place emphasis in the areas where he wants us to look or to define the form of the figure as existing in three-dimensional space? Is he using a different quality of line on the faces than on clothing? Look at his handling of arms. Notice how with the simple use of a darker, heavier line on one side of the arm and a thin, crisp line on the other side gives the illusion of form and weight. Study these drawings yourself and see what else you discover.

Zak Smith

Smith is an extreme case. It is stating the obvious to point out that all of these drawings make IMMENSE use of line variation. Your job is to study them and observe the ways that line variation creates a push-and-pull. Do certain marks or objects seem stand out to you than others? Do others recede? How was that achieved?

Homework Due on Wednesday, September 9

Interior: One-Point Perspective

Choose an interior space from which to draw. Make sure that you are comfortable in this space because you will be using it for the next two homework assignments as well.

Working from observation, but using the interior mostly as a guide, draw the interior in one-point perspective. Remember with each object you draw to begin with a flat, geometric shape with no foreshortening and THEN recede your orthogonals (please forgive my mispronunciation of that word in class) to the vanishing point. For this assignment, I don't need to see your orthogonals receding all the way to the vanishing point like we did in class. You can erase any lines that do not define the object you are drawing.

Here's a good online tutorial to practice drawing interiors in one-point perspective: http://www.olejarz.com/arted/perspective/start.html (Just ignore the suggestion to not use soft pencils. That's what we're using here, folks!)

LINE ONLY

Materials: Drawing pencils (2B, 4B, 6B), yardstick, bond paper (18"x24")

Blog: Search the Internet for artists' images demonstrating 1-, 2-, and 3-point perspective. Post good examples to your blog and label them.

If you don't know how to download an image, here are some steps: (I'm assuming everyone is a Mac user) Place the pointer on the image you want to download and right-click (or press "control" on the keyboard and click if the right-click doesn't work). Scroll down to "Save Image to Downloads" and click. The image is now in your "downloads" folder.

Click HERE for directions on how to upload images to your blog. When you click on the "browse" button to locate your images, remember that they are in the "downloads" folder.

E-mail me or submit a comment to this post if you have any difficulties.