Observational drawing is an essential skill for artists to develop at the middle and high school level to represent what they are drawing realistically. While some people may have natural abilities, representational drawing is still something that takes time, effort, patience, and practice. I can’t tell you how many times adults and young people have tried to convince me that they are not creative and said, “I can’t even draw a stick figure.” This makes me laugh because I definitely know that the majority of people are not able to pick up a pencil and draw their self-portrait as the perfect mirror image of their faces. However, what other skills have you ever picked up and automatically demonstrated mastery? Drawing is a learnable skill that can be improved over time with focus, technique, practice, and a little self-forgiveness.
Practicing drawing from a still-life is a great place to start for developing the fundamental skills of realism. Students often prefer to draw from a photo on their device but an image is a flattened, two-dimensional document that has already been composed by the photographer and doesn’t show the true values of light and shadow that you would be able to see from the three-dimensional form in life. While the art history textbooks are filled with still-life paintings and drawings of flowers and fruit, high school students seem to be a little more interested in their shoes. The Art I high school class was asked to bring in a shoe from home to draw from everyday or to take off the shoe they were wearing that day to draw during class. This gave students the opportunity to really look at their shoe and study it from different perspectives as they fine-tuned their critical eye to the shapes, details, and relative spatial awareness of the physical shoe in front of them.
There can be a bit of insecurity and even anxiety to overcome when faced with a realistic drawing assignment. To tackle the fear head on, we began the unit with a class reading and discussion of the article, “The Three Reasons Why you Can’t Draw (And What to Do about It),” by Will Kemp. We talked about what it means to “be in the flow” when your brain is switched off from its self-criticism and completely engaged in what you are doing in the moment. By changing the tone of your internal self-talk and centering your mind on the task at hand, your brain is more welcome to the challenge of learning something new that requires focus. Some students shared with the group their own frustrations with drawing and we talked about strategies that we could use to overcome these obstacles. We concluded this lesson with a self-reflection writing on Schoology responding to the article so that I could get feedback from everyone in the group who did not share aloud.
The next day, we started class with a warm-up activity from Betty Edwards’ workbook, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” to activate their observational skills and begin to turn off their negative self-talk. The students were given a copy of Pablo Picasso’s “Portrait of Igor Stravinsky” (1920) and were asked to try to draw what they saw on their own paper using a colored pencil so that they wouldn’t be tempted to stop multiple times and erase their drawings. After about ten minutes of noble efforts and the creeping giggles paired with “look at mine, look how bad my drawing is...” we switched gears. I had the students flip Picasso’s drawing upside down and cover the whole image in a piece of construction paper. I demonstrated revealing only one section of the image at a time and to draw exactly what I see in that row on my new sheet of paper before sliding the paper down a little more to connect the next row of lines, shapes, and spaces. Instead of focusing on drawing the hands, eyes, or jacket, we are forced to see a curved line, a zig-zag shape, an open area, and another line that adds on to the original zig-zag.
This is where the artistic brain really shines and I noticed the group hunker in and attempt to draw their upside-down Picassos with a quiet focus that would make an old-school librarian smile. We settled into the drawing zone and after thirty minutes of observational drawing, I gave the class a break and we compared the before and after drawings on the smart board for the class to witness the original attempt side-by-side with the upside down second version. While some of the students were still not convinced that their second drawing had improved, we could all acknowledge that the second drawings had more accurate proportions and additional details that were missing in the original drawings.
The upside down drawing lesson was a warm-up for the brain’s artistic eye serving more as an appetizer for the main course of drawing exercises of hands. The students learned about the differences between contour line and shading with value in representational drawing. We practiced 60 second three-dimensional poses of our hands by drawing the lines, edges, and details without taking our eyes off our fingers. With each hand drawing, the students were given opportunities to divert their attention back-and-forth between looking at their hand and looking at their drawing, but they had to keep most of their focus on observing the hand. This was followed by contour line drawings of the shoe that they were studying from life. With each draft, the students were unknowingly increasing their endurance for prolonged periods of observational drawing. The shoe drawings became more detailed, more accurate, and more representational of what they were actually seeing in real life.
It was with great excitement that I distributed large 18 x 24 inch drawing papers to each student to begin the final project. They were ready for this! Now that they had the tools to tackle the challenge ahead, the students were given a little creative freedom to exaggerate the scale of their shoes so that one shoe might be drawn in an extreme close-up, while another might be so small that it fits between the laces of another shoe drawing. The students were encouraged to overlap their drawings and balance out the space of their compositions with shoes in different positions as if the shoes were walking all over the artwork.
Over approximately ten days, the shoe drawings came to life. Some students experimented with drawing shoes in the background behind previous drawings and others overlapped shoes so that they were almost transparent within each other. Since we had dedicated so much time and practice to representing realistic shoes with contour lines, the shading component of the project was presented as an artistic decision for each student. They could shade values realistically in graphite or shade solid, overlapped sections in the colors of their choice. The background space needed to be balanced with the shoe composition, but was another personal choice on how they wanted to complete it.
As the students continued to draw shoes in their composition, I encouraged them to take mental breaks by taking a step back and accessing their work-in-progress. At the end of the first week on the project, we participated in a group exercise called “Post-It Critique” where students were given two different colors of post-it notes and walked around the room until they found an artwork from one of their classmates to study. They were asked to write a positive note of something the artist is doing well and also write a note of improvement on their second post-it for something the artist can continue to work on as they finish the piece. We repeated this exercise so that everyone had notes from at least two different people’s perspectives. It felt a little like a silent auction, but it was a nice way for some students to receive validation for their work so far.
After intense focus on observational drawing, this element of personal choice gives the pieces individuality and style. I appreciate how well my students put forth their best effort to draw from observation and enjoy being able to give them complete ownership of the final outcome. I want my students to learn these important skills but not succumb to pleasing their teacher’s preference or the idea of their artwork being right or wrong. It is always an artist’s decision when a work is finished and it is up to each person to put the work into their artwork.
“These boots are made for walking, and that's just what they'll do.
One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you!” (Nancy Sinatra)
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