Introduction to Drawing - Week 1

This Monday (17th February), I’ll be starting the second round of ‘Introduction to Drawing’. This series of 5 workshops with Adult Learning Shetland is suitable for various abilities, including beginners, and aims to take participants through some of the fundamentals of drawing.

We’ll try a range of practices, materials and methods, as well as explore a short history of drawing. 

Week 1, ‘Shape and Line’, is about introducing drawing in its simplest of form – ‘an artist’s use of line to make a picture’. The ‘artist’ can be anyone - anyone who wishes to describe or communicate something visually. 

Here is just one of the drawing exercises we’ll be trying to start practising line and shape.

Wire Drawing

Looking at the world with the intention of drawing it is very different to seeing the world as we do every day. This short exercise is to get comfortable with making marks and with close observation - to not draw the world as we think we see it, but to really look. 

Take a piece of wire and bend it to a shape, not anything recognisable, but just a random shape. Grab a pencil and, observing it carefully, record what you see, using one slowly executed continuous line. Hold the pencil about half way up and feel movements from your whole arm, not just the wrist as with writing. Don’t lift the pencil, but work with purpose and fluidity, being aware of the changes of direction in the line and where it is going - remember a ‘line is a directional force’ [1]. Look back and forth between your drawing and the wire as you go to check your observation.

1. ARISTIDES, Juliette. 2019. Beginning Drawing Atelier. New York: Monacelli Studio.