Teaching Elite Animation Academy virtual summer camps has lead me to drawing some odd stuff. One issue beginning students have is not knowing what to draw. In a world full of billions and billions of things to draw I find this notion confounding.Many beginning students are caught up in drawing cartoon characters to impress friends and family. I try and break them away from that habit to draw the world around them.
In the foundation drawing class I ask students to first draw their hand while not looking at the page. You can tell when a student looked when a drawing comes back where the line touches where it began. We attack that assignment a few times until I convince them to make an absolute mess.
Then we do the same thing but glance down every time the pencil needs to be re positioned to start a new line. Each line is a bit meandering since it moves at the same pace as the eye across the object. This idea of visually touching the object takes time and practice to convey.
Then we turn to any object in the room. I chose this rough carved panther head which is an unused book end for my book case. Lines don’t close off shapes and there are dozens of mistakes but there is some very deliberate observation in each line put down. If you add some color, it all pulls together.