Art with Cynthia

1. Design Introduction: This month we will continue to draw from life and photos, and we will use some new tools. We'll do some more expressive (less realistic) drawings; Also, we will do more study of composition. a. Still life- I asked you to collect 3 to 5 vegetables with interesting shapes and set up a still life, preferably with a blank background behind it. Ideally, your still life will have some form of natural light or a good lamp nearby. The light source doesn’t have to shine directly on the center of your objects. Light coming from one side can make for an interesting sketch too. b. Homework- And I asked you to make at least one blind contour drawing of your arrangement - A blind contour is a good warm up, to bypass the L-brain idea of "how to draw vegetables" and go to R-brain seeing the shapes and curves. c. Review- Some concepts we covered last time are: 1) Contours (the edges of things.) 2) Form (the 3-dimensional bulk of what you are drawing translated int...

Composition is the way you arrange the parts of your picture on the page. Artists work to arrange the parts (lines, shapes, colors, and textures) on the page so that they will grab the viewer’s attention and keep the eye moving all around.  When you begin to work with composition you step away from rendering exactly what you see, and begin to make artistic decisions about what you want to express, and how. The process of composing the picture is called design , a process of selection, simplification, distortion, and rearranging.  Artists use "principles of design" to make decisions about how to arrange the parts of a drawing. Some of these include: Variety:  Using different shapes, lines, colors, and textures to create interest. Harmony: Using similar shapes, lines, colors, and textures to help the design hold together.  Unity:  Organizing the parts of a design so they work together.  Simplicity: Eliminating parts in order to create better unity. Balan...