Monday Morning Art School: please learn to draw
Drawing is the cheapest and most liberating of all media. All you need is a sketchbook, a mechanical pencil, and a straight-edge.
Reverse aging by learning to draw
Use it or lose it? No, train it and gain it. Learning a new skill develops mental acuity in the aging brain.
Learning to draw without a teacher
Can you learn to draw from a book? Absolutely! Here are some suggestions, and I’d love to hear about your favorites. Occasionally, I’ll send a student home from a workshop with the advice that he or she should take a basic drawing class. I’ll see that person the following summer only to learn that there …
Zoom Class: Fundamentals of Drawing
Mondays, 1 PM – 4 PM EST Everyone can and should learn to draw. Some artists believe they can skip this step, but drawing is the basis of all painting. Others are afraid of drawing, but broken down into discrete tasks, drawing is so straightforward that anyone can do it. After teaching painting for several …
Exercise: Observational Drawing
Learn to Copy What You See Drawing is all about measurement and angles. Copying other drawings is a great way to learn how to observe detail. When you copy a drawing, you have to pay close attention to the shapes, lines, and angles in the original image. In this exercise, you will copy 5 line …
Step 2: The Value Drawing
Better paintings every time The value sketch is the oil painter’s secret weapon. It’s an opportunity to plan your painting in advance, before you ever pick up a brush. And it’s critical; if the value structure is compelling, your painting will be compelling. If not, your painting is doomed from the start. Nothing in painting …
Monday Morning Art School: how important is drawing, anyway?
Drawing is the grammar of art, and color is art’s vocabulary. As with language, we learn them both intuitively and intentionally.
How to practice drawing (when you don’t feel talented)
Drawing is not a magic trick—it’s a series of steps like long division or attaching a sleeve to a dress. Anyone willing to put in the time can learn it.
Monday Morning Art School: what do you use for drawing?
What tools do you love for drawing, and why?
You can’t abstract if you can’t draw
Try reducing one of these paintings to a notan, and you’ll realize just how much drawing underpins this seeming simplicity. Plein air painting by Tara Will, courtesy of the artist. “Why are you teaching us self-portrait?” a student recently asked me. The human face is the most demanding subject to draw, because very slight errors …