The following article is written by Nissa Enos for the weekly Art Forward article from the Rahr-West Art Museum.
Manitowoc Area Home Schoolers recently hosted a 3-session art class for ages 9 through adult. Twenty students representing a wide variety of ages learned techniques for drawing. There is art in general, which includes paint and colors and pleasing visual impressions of all sorts, and there is drawing in specific, which is a particular skill within art. Drawing asks, can you make the shapes look right?
The theme was animals of the Amazon River basin, as this was thought to have broad popular appeal and to have the seasonally appropriate added interest of the hint of warmer weather.
Students were each given a folder containing an instruction sheet, black and white photocopies of twelve iconic Amazonian animals, and ample sheets of copy paper. Cost per student was $3, which mostly went towards paying for photocopies. The other materials necessary for learning to draw are much cheaper. Using copy paper and a non-mechanical pencil mean you won’t be intimidated by fancy supplies.
Jaguar (Panthera onca) drawn by Ruby Vera, age 9, and Alegra Voelker, age 13. Notice the similarity in overall shape, size, and placement of features. This is what is meant by being “generally correct.” It is the primary building-block of becoming a good drawer.
Ultimately it is best to draw from real life but photos will do in a pinch. Plus, it would have been difficult to get twelve Amazonian animals into the art space.
Students were asked to draw the animal upside-down. This tricks the brain into drawing what is really there, not what it thinks is there. It puts a stop to stick figures.
The method is elaborated in detail in Betty Edwards’s book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” In the class materials, each animal was printed so that it appeared upside-down above its label, which gave the common name and the scientific name.
One of the side-goals was to show that there are often multiple species or subspecies of each type of animal. It isn’t just an alligator, it is a spectacled caiman, which by extension implies there are all kinds of alligators and alligator-like animals.
Provided images were cropped tightly so the animal touched the frame on all four sides. This created reference points for the artist. Reference points are like landmarks that help an artist keep their place. They include where two lines meet, prominent features such as eyes, or the part of a shape where it is maximally wide or narrow.
Hyacinth macaw (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus) and Amazon river dolphin (Inia geoffrensis) drawn by Colten Fitzgerald, age 12, and Ellee Welch, age 11. Note the complex curves in the beak of the bird and around the face of the dolphin. These areas are too difficult for the verbal mind to render. The visual mind must lead.
At first, outlines were drawn with the animal removed. Students were provided with photocopies where the subject had been carefully excised with a hobby knife. The idea was that by focusing on the negative space, the empty space around the subject, the visual brain is better able to draw complex shapes that don’t immediately look like what the verbal brain expects.
After students did the outline, they flipped to a second image where the animal was replaced. They continued drawing interior lines showing the physical shape of the animal. “Optical illusion” lines such as those created by color pattern or shadow were not added until after the real, physical shape was completed.
After outlining came shading.
Students were instructed to group lightness and darkness into four categories. Absolute whites got no shading whatsoever, at least to begin with. You can always add later. Light reflections in eyes were an example. Additional categories were light shadow, medium shadow, and dark shadow.
Squinting one’s eyes at the subject was recommended for determining shadow. Sometimes you have to squint your eyes almost completely shut. It is difficult to tell how much light or shadow is present because our visual system processes this information automatically, but this method breaks things down into obvious categories.
Giant river otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) and green anaconda (Eunectes murinus) drawn by Aiden and Lilianna Fitzgerald. Large curves such as those found around the back and tail of the otter and in the body of the snake sound easy, but they are one of the hardest things to draw.
In retrospect, art kits could have contained fewer pictures, since most artists did one drawing per hour-long class, not three or four. It was difficult for artists to follow the instruction to draw upside-down and the majority of the students flipped their reference pictures right-side up, so future classes should focus less on introducing a wide variety of methodological instructions and should focus more on practicing just one or two simple, clear-cut exercises.
The instructor is grateful that students signed up and participated with enthusiasm. Students came from a wide variety of art backgrounds. Some drew a lot on their own and had preferred subjects ranging from people to fantasy creatures to animals and others did not have much interest or background in drawing, yet they enrolled in class anyway.
I hope you enjoy seeing these works produced in the class. Don’t worry about being perfect, just try to be generally correct, and with practice, anyone can gain basic confidence and competence at drawing.
