Engaged Drawing

This photographic screensaver above speaks volumes. Students are engaged.  In this frozen moment, you can see the intensity in their eyes as they capture the model on the pages or screens in front of them. This was a wonderful, productive month of drawing with my Grade Eleven IB Visual Art classes.  From contour drawing with wire, to blind-drawing with iPads and conventional drawing tools, many students showed tremendous growth in their capacity to see (and draw).  Importantly, the students found joy in the drawing process.  Three eighty-minute sessions with a live model were a highlight of the month.

The most rewarding outcome of the work was that some students discovered their drawing ability.  Some students, who previously feared drawing or felt they were inadequate drawers, discovered a strength within themselves.  Each student produced a body of work that was unique to him/her.  “There is no one right way to draw,” says the teacher. Sometimes students actually start to believe this and see their own individual strengths and stop comparing themselves to others.  The comparison of drawing skills often starts in the early grades at school and it can really crush students’ confidence when some students get accolades and get pegged as “the good drawers” by peers and teachers. It is not too late to undo the preconceptions and through a series of exercises and a less precious approach to mark-making, students can loosen up and start to enjoy the drawing process and appreciate their own work.

At the end of the month-of-drawing, students were asked to select their strongest works to share with classmates for the final critique.  Some students chose drawings they completed on iPads while others chose pieces they had created on paper with pastel or ink.  One student chose a drawing that she had created on her laptop with a tablet.  This student was very comfortable with the tablet and stylus tools but this particular drawing marked a turning point for her as it was done in a totally different style than the other work that she had done previously with these digital tools, which were slick and stylistic.  For the first time, she was loosely sketching and experimenting with blind drawing with the tablet. It was wonderful that she recognised this herself and that she now knows she can break out of the stylistic way of drawing with her tablet if she wishes. This student also discovered that the tablet can be a perfect way to blind draw because one can draw on the tablet and turn the laptop screen off and therefore the drawing is completely invisible. Eureka = digital blind drawing!

I love when students recognize their strengths and their challenges in their final reflections.  I watched students struggle with quick contour drawings and blind-drawings because they lacked total control of the process.  It is wonderful when students own this and say that it is an area that they know they need to work on.

Earlier this year, I got to be the drawing student and experience the magic of blind-drawing all over again. While attending the SCAD Art Educators Forum in Savannah, Georgia this summer, I took a Blind Drawing Course taught by Dick Bjornseth.

 It was a wonderful little class with just a few students.  Bjornseth brought some amazing art objects for us to draw, including his collection of bizarre plastic dolls and toys.  These are a few of the blind drawings that I produced over the week-long class.  I loved every minute of the course, from Bjornseth’s fantastic stories from a life-time of art-making to the hours spent, intensely blind-drawing.  Blind drawing is something that I have been doing for decades but I never get tired of the process.  Taking this course reminded me how much I love it and showed me another teachers approach to blind drawing.

http://www.scad.edu/info-for/educators/

Figure Drawing: Traditional Vs Digital

I love drawing. Getting my students excited about drawing is an important part of my role as an art educator.  Students in the secondary art classroom often come to drawing lessons with baggage.  Some may have decided already that  they "cannot draw" while others may be the benefactors of years of outside drawing lessons with tutors and they may have been told that they "can draw very well."  I like to start the group off on an even playing field, namely, we start with blind contour drawing.

There is nothing revolutionary about blind contour drawing as people have been teaching this method for years. For some of my students this may be their first exposure to the technique. I remind them that the exercise is about drawing what they see and not what they know.  Sometimes, the "well-trained" student becomes frustrated because they can't demonstrate those techniques that they have learned.  The loss of control can be quite frustrating for some.  Others may be challenged because they have never really looked at a subjects so intensely before. Either way, the exercise is good for students and brings them out of their comfort zone and it may shatter perceptions about who the "good drawers are." I normally offer the students an array of materials to work with, such as chalk, charcoal, ink, pencils, chopsticks and paint, etc.  This year, after working for about a year with drawing apps on the iPad myself, I introduced five i-pads into the drawing class as an option for students.

                           


Friday was our first day with doing figure drawing with a live model.  For most, it was the first time they had drawn a nude model.  I decided while we were dealing with "newness" and experimenting with risk-taking, this was a good time to introduce the iPad. Students did a series of drawings over the eighty-minute class, which included blind-drawing, 80% blind drawing and a series of quick gesture drawings.  Over the course of the period, students were asked to change materials and experiment with everything.  Some students were drawn quickly to the iPad while others completely resisted the technology. I loved the way the majority of students moved seamlessly from traditional material to digital technology and back again. For the last twenty-minutes of the period, students were invited to choose their material of choice to create a detailed, final drawing.  Interestingly, in my class with sixteen students, only one student opted for the iPad and in my smaller class, no-one opted to use the iPad for their final drawing and all chose traditional media.

Something that I observed while watching students work side-by -side with iPads and traditional drawing materials was that their posture changed when they used iPads. Students using the iPads were clearly in their comfort zone.   It was interesting to observe students standing or sitting up quite straight in front of the easel to draw and yet spines were curved when these same students were using iPads.  Perhaps this has something to do with the smaller size of the iPad versus the large expanse of the drawing paper or perhaps it is just comfort and familiarity.  (As I am creating this blog on my iPad, I too have taken on this relaxed posture, perhaps iPads and laptops have just become an extension of us.)

At the end of this first class we had a show and tell where each student put up her favourite drawings. There were iPad drawings in the mix, along with drawings on paper.  I asked the students to compare the drawing experience between an iPad and a traditional instrument and the reviews were mixed.  Some students said that the iPad was more comfortable and the line was more smooth while others said that they felt constrained by the size of the iPad (regulars not the new minis) and would use this tool with ease if it was as large as the A-2 or A-3 paper that they were using. The drawing adventure continues in this upcoming week with our live model coming out for two more eighty-minute classes.

The drawing apps for the iPad that we used included: Brushes, Paper 53, Procreate, Artrage & SketchbookX