Composition in Painting
Lesson 11:
Up to this point we’ve been focusing on some very basic skills.  And many of the techniques and elements will be learned through practice. However, there is another part of becoming a painter that also requires practice. And that is teaching yourself how to look at, and create compositions within a picture plane.  Your picture plane is simply the area in which you are drawing. It is the shape of your paper, or canvas.  But that rectangle has certain rules regarding how to arrange the elements of …

How To Shade
Continuing our exploration of the elements of drawing/painting now leads us to Value and how to shade. Value is the term we use when referring to how dark or light a shadow is. This is extremely important as we progress towards painting because every color also has a darkness. We will be exploring the value of color in subsequent lessons. This easiest way to understand Value is to think about shading. The “value” is basically how dark the shading is.
Another important thing to remember is that every object …

Drawing Skills: Measuring
Lesson 9
This lesson will deal with learning how to improve your drawing skills by creating a unit of measurement for drawing. You will use your pencil to measure and draw a still life which will be set up in front of you. In the first drawing by Honore Daumier you can see that the practice goes back many hundreds of years. People still use it, because it works.

All you have to do is hold a pencil or brush at arms length, close one eye, and move your thumb …

Drawing Form
Lesson 8
Now that we have got a good grasp of line, and the importance of varying our lines in our drawing we are going to continue on to another huge element of drawing/painting. That important element is form.  Correctly understanding form will give your paintings/drawings more depth. Traditionally schools have taught students to look for four key forms. These are The Cube, The Cylinder, The Sphere,  and variations and combinations of these forms.

Using combinations of these three basic forms can enable to draw virtually anything on the planet. It …

Line Variation
Lesson 7

Line Variation.

Drawing #13 “Line Variation Shoe”

In these drawings you are going to be exploring line variation. It is important that the lines in your drawings have varying thicknesses. Because of its versatility and ability to make highly varied lines we will be using a brush and ink. This will make the drawing appear more lively and dynamic. Later on will start exploring how different line thicknesses can also give a drawing “weight” but for this first drawing just trust your intuition and vary the thickness of your line. …