Advanced Drawing and Composition 2016 week 5

The fifth session of the Advanced Drawing and Composition class for Winter 2016 was held on Wednesday, February 10. We spent most of the class on a thorough critique of the homework, using worksheets and handouts to guide our thoughts, and discussed the importance of having relationships between all components of a piece. We were made aware of the differences between a value statement vs. a judgment, and Dick talked about why, as an artist, it is so important to identify your theme before beginning your work. We received a new homework assignment, and wrapped up our session with a fun game that conveyed the difficulty in communicating an accurate visual message.

Advanced Drawing and Composition 2016 week 4

The fourth session of the Advanced Drawing and Composition class for Winter 2016 was held on Wednesday, February 3. We shared and critiqued our skull drawings, discussed surface differences in more detail, and refreshed our memory on the ‘six phases of creative problem solving’. We spent a good portion of class discussing our next challenge, COMPOSITION. What is it, and why is it important? Read an excerpt, and listen to the full discussion near the end of the post.

Advanced Drawing and Composition 2016 week 3

The third session of the Advanced Drawing and Composition class for Winter 2016 was held on Wednesday, January 27. We spent time reviewing the corrected or re-drawn images from last week’s assignment, with more questions about light and shadow angles; visualizing the whole shape even when it is invisible from our vantage point; and fine-tuning your rendering technique to achieve the suggestion of form through gray values. Valérie again provided many useful videos covering these topics. The last portion of our class time was spent drawing a cow skull with our new medium, charcoal.

Advanced Drawing and Composition 2016 week 2

The second session of the Advanced Drawing and Composition class for Winter 2016 was held on Wednesday, January 20. We studied shadows in more detail, critiqued the homework, and watched another demonstration on plotting spherical shadows. We discussed the challenges of the paper clip drawings, the idea of a ‘surface scale’ to show the qualities of reflectiveness in an object, and had a brief introduction to a new medium, charcoal.