Exercise 1 – Continuous Line Drawing
Skill Level: None
What: Draw the Entire Subject in One Line
How:
Pick your reference
- Hold the drawing tool/implement comfortably, not gripping it too tightly. The idea is to let the arm swing freely from the shoulder and not get too caught up in the “writing” way of working. Find the shapes through the idea of wandering with the tool.
2. Starting someplace specific is not important. In this case, I decided to start with the stem, the smallest darkest part of the object, getting the little things out of the way so the rest of the drawing could explore larger strokes and more aggressive wandering.
3. Instead of starting with the red areas, I decided I wanted to explore the yellow spaces first. Now, I could have just gone with the overall shape of the apple, however, I like that this apple is like a puzzle of colors and want to break it up into more patches or spaces of thought, so I split the red and yellow into zones to find each one separately while attempting to keep it all cohesive and whole.
4. Moving on to the red zones, I also reverse the darkness and lightness of each area making the red spaces lighter than the yellow. This means that the amount of line scribbling I do has less in it as well being less involved so that there are fewer marks within the red zone, giving it the appearance of looking lighter than the yellow spots that have more concentrated and condensed lines in them.
5. Feeling like I broke the spots up too much, I continue to wander over the entire apple passing through both zones of color until I feel like it has a more cohesive look to it. Note that they do not much resemble each other, and that is totally fine. The objective was not to capture likeness, but to get lost in the arrangement of spots until it feels something like what I was looking at. What is more important is that I enjoyed the moment and had fun capturing something in a creative way without worry that I might get it wrong.
