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Lesson 1 Assignment – Drawing

Read the Lesson 1 textbook "Keys to Drawing by Bert Dodson"

The assignment:

  1. Sketch and draw – you will hopefully, like the rest of us, keep doing this forever. Draw anything, your shoes, out the window, at the coffee shop, copy the drawings in the Lesson 1 textbook – draw. Buy some cheap paper for practice sketching, save the good paper for assignments even though there are many sheets in your Lesson 1 pad.
     
  2. Do a sketch of the solid forms in this image . . .

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  1. , , , either copying from the screen or printing the form image and working from that. Do your submission drawing on one of the pages of the pad we supplied you with.
  2. Do a still life – some fruit, some books, any combination in a sketchy fashion or as a complete picture. Again, sketch and sketch and do the submission still life on the pad supplied - fill the page.
  3. Draw a landscape- out the window or on a trip into the outside world.
  4. Draw people – yourself in a mirror or someone else anywhere – lots of practice sketches and then a larger one filling a page of the pad we supplied you.

 
A word about your camera – it is a marvelous tool for an artist, aside from it's use for sending images of your assignment work to the school. Degas used cameras to make paintings and drawings from and so can you. If you study a mountain carefully, you’ll find the picture you see at the beginning is not the same one you see five minutes later. The light changes, the shadows change, clouds change the brightness. Try taking photos and drawing from them as well as working directly from nature. If you do make a photo of any of the subjects in your assignments, send them along with your digital photos of your assignment drawings with your Lesson 1 e-mail. So you may have 5 photos or even 10 photos to send for Lesson 1. Alternately, your could do two drawings on a page and send no "research" photos and end up sending 2 or 3 photos of your assignment drawings only. Choice is yours. Your e-mail service may have a problem with large attachments, so if you send many images which are large files, you may have to attach a couple to one e-mail and others to subsequent e-mails or if you have compressions software like WinZip you could compress a series of images into a compressed WinZip file.

If you are interested in more information on how artists used cameras and their predecessors, from your library you could get:

A book on the use of the camera or camera obscura at Amazon.com:
Vermeer's Camera : Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces
by Philip Steadman

For more on all then uses of the camera and other aids to painting; also at Amazon.com is: Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters by David Hockney

After you send your Lesson 1 assignment e-mail and attached photos, you could buy Lesson 2 you should start reading your Lesson 2 book "Composition in Art by Henry Rankin Poore" – shortly after we receive your Lesson 1 e-mail, we will post your Lesson 2 assignment to your personal WEB folder and notify by e-mail you that the Lesson 1 critique is on your personal WEB folder ready to be seen.

Barry Waldman

barry@bridgemillartcenter.com

© 2007 Barry Waldman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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