This week Alec and Sarah have introduced us to the class and some of the content of the class to make sure we would be familiar with some of the things going forwards into the class. They started discussing that every artist has started out somewhere so nobody was good at the very start, which means practise makes everyone do great things. This goes about everything else in the world. It also takes time to improve your drawing so there is so rush, as long as you are doing it little by little you will eventually improve and you won’t even notice it. This week they are talking about the fundamentals of drawing and how fun it can actually be starting from the very bottom because some of us can often forget that the most basic things can be the most important of all. They showed us a couple of pictures and figures and told us to look at objects or things like shapes because it helps us to structure different things easily without adding in the details then. After that you can keep perfecting it until you think its finished. The most important topic of this week is the form and shapes of everything around us. They have discussed with us about how to hold your pencil and how some of the ways might be more beneficial in drawing specific things. Every artist has a different style so, everyone is going to be holding the pencil differently depending on their liking and how they like to do things. We talked about the way we might hold our pencil to write, is not usually the perfect way of holding the pencil for things like drawing and such because when you are writing you are using your wrist a lot. When you perfect and find your perfect holding position for the pencil you are then able to start constructing things from any object or anything from life or even imagination. This of course has to start out with shapes all the time.
We then did an exercise where we all took our sketchbook or digital tools and then we use drew a full page of lines of circles just messing around and warming up our wrist which I found was really fun and exciting because we are starting from the basics and taking our time to ready up.
Exercises
We talked about how you are able to look at anything in the world artistically and ten break everything down using simple shapes like circle, square and triangle. This helps us to form different things that you want and then turn them into something better. The main point was always start out with shapes. Thought if you wanted your shapes and designs to turn into something better you would have to add things like depth to our work in order for your design to feel physical and actually real. You can do this usually by using forms like shading and lighting.
We looked at a couple of examples of simple shapes and then at their forms and how they can be manipulated in order to make them real and physical. It is very easy to start constructing anything that you want by just using shapes.
We then did another exercise which was really fun as well. They told us to use any of the shapes that we want and create some simple characters that you want and we did just that. I think i created some simple characters, but I was very surprised how easy it is to do it by just using shapes. You can just draw a couple shapes close to each other and then construct some of the character that you might want.
We then were asked to fill a page with things like basic forms like cubes, cylinders and cones. The main things for this exercise was to just think about the light and where its coming from and what direction it might be facing so then you can shade in the part that might be visible for the person. This changes if you change different points of view.
Then there was another exercise that we did and it was about the direction of the lines and different things. We were then told to draw different forms into different directions of the line that we drew . I feel like this exercise is was important to pay attention to because you learn that the effect of depth is very important and will be useful everywhere and anything that you do.
Then we were told to go to our groups and discuss different early life forms that might have formed in our world designs etc. This was quite fun as well because our team discussed different creatures that could be attacking the people in the earth since our idea was about people being attacked by a virus that makes them have different stages of freshers. We then just talked about simple shapes and forms that we could maybe use for our world, most of it was just circles because the virus was like a slug small and slimy and barely visible from far away. We weren’t thinking about anything except things like shapes, so mostly circles and slug looking shapes.
Then there was another exercise that we had to do was just to take our different shapes that we had and try to combine them into different forms that maybe could be used for our world which was quite interesting I would say.
Then there was another exercise called the flour sack and it was just about taking two basic forms a cube and a sphere that helped us make the flour sack.
For home work we were told to just keep studying different forms and shapes that help us with different designs that can be formed from different shapes. Look at 3 favourite animated characters and study their form and try maybe drawing them in different positions. I have researched some of my favourite characters here below.
I just looked at a couple of my favourite characters and try to find their shapes and trace on my sketchbook by practising different shapes and trying to break the character down into them. Then I took one of the favourite drawings that I did and a bit of shading and try to make it look as good as possible.
These are definitely not great designs, but I enjoyed researching and learning about different shapes and how they can be used to easily form different character and designs. This was a really fun experience for me because I learned a lot about the importance of shapes and how they form anything. Every design out there probably have started with a shape.
Mantas Macidulskas 