The eLearning Center for Gatlin Education Services

Learn how to analyze what you see in the world around you and communicate it on paper. Through hands-on projects, and guided by a professional artist, you will explore the critical concepts of line, mass, form, perspective, value, and composition, building a solid foundation for all your art and design work. And most importantly, you'll also discover that drawing can be fun. Did you know that spheres have inner edges? Or why artists measure with their thumbs? This course is your first step to developing your craft as an artist.

LESSON 1: Seeing Things Together Lesson One focuses on learning to see the form of objects in the physical world. Rather than drawing every last detail in your subjects, will learn to recognize the basic form of what you see. Lesson One explores this topic, helping you develop a sense of the visual relationship between different elements in your composition. You'll get an orientation to your art materials, learning how to set up a drawing board and hold and sharpen your pencil. In the exercise, you'll practice creating different kinds of lines and hone your observation skills through a freehand drawing of a familiar object.

LESSON 2: Representing Form To a skilled artist, a bottle is not a bottle, and nor is an apple an apple. Whether they are solid or liquid, all bodies with mass have a form that you can communicate through drawing. Lesson Two deepens your understanding of form, showing you how the elements in your composition can be viewed as fundamental geometrical shapes and objects. You'll also examine the principles of linear perspective, learning about the vanishing point, 1-, 2-, and 3-point perspective, and the phenomenon of foreshortening. Two techniques are addressed to help your integrate these ideas into your work—using measuring points, and using your good ol' thumb as reference. In the exercise, you'll apply all this knowledge to a still life project.

LESSON 3: Structural Lines Lesson Three explores techniques for conveying the structural lines in your drawing subjects. You'll revisit the concept of basic forms and look at how contour lines can wrap themselves around objects. You'll examine the concept of positive and negative space to see the interlocking shapes created by objects and their surroundings. Finally, you'll study how to feeling of mass can be created by the technique of gestural drawing. In the exercise you will create a quick gestural drawing and then a second drawing in which you will construct a second drawing utilizing structural lines.

LESSON 4: Light Part, Dark Part Separating parts of your drawings into light and dark or shadow areas will go along way toward helping you create the illusion of depth and volume. In this lesson you'll examine how lighting conditions such as interior/exterior location, direction, and angle of light can combine to affect the level of contrast and drama in your drawings. You'll look at how two art masters applied basic value contrast and learn how to look for the shadow edge and casting shadow in your still life subjects. In the exercise, you'll do a light part/dark part study of your own.

LESSON 5: Adding Value Once you've mastered the basic (but profound) concept of light/dark contrast, you're ready to explore how to convey different levels of value in your drawings. Depending on lighting conditions and the form of your subject, you may need to recognize and represent six different levels of value: highlights, mid-tones, shadow edge, casting shadow, core shadow, and reflected light. You'll examine these concepts in the lesson, addressing the concept of high and low key drawing and learn how to create different kinds of line. In the exercise, you'll apply this knowledge to a classic value study, the representation of an egg and its shadow.

LESSON 6: Composition and Depth Lesson Six helps you put together everything you've learned in the course, with a focus on composition and creating the illusion of depth on the picture plane. First, you'll explore several techniques for expressing depth: linear perspective, atmospheric perspective, separating the composition into foreground, mid-ground, and background, and vertical location, space, and overlapping forms. Then you'll examine two classic approaches to composition: repeated forms and implied lines. You'll wrap up with a reminder of the fundamentals, then dive into your final extended project.