December 28, 2012

  • Charcoal & Children
    Lesson Two: Cup & Curl

    So I didn’t like how deep the first book jumped into charcoal after its first initial intro to tools/technique.  Luckily, I’d ordered a book from the library called “Start Sketching and Drawing Now” (LINK).  The voice it’s written in is more kid-friendly, and we like it.  I don’t plan to buy it (it’s expensive!!), but we can check it out of the library, occasionally.  And use it WITH our other book.  We’ll see.

    What we learned this week is that drawing with sketchy, light lines is too broken and fuzzy.  That drawing with regular, even-pressured lines that are unbroken is too boring and plain.  What you want is to hold your pencil the wonky-way, hold it to your easel, and try to get a shape by making a variety of lines.  I’m SO, SO, SO glad they gave us an example to follow:

    Like that.  So we got out coffee mugs and gave it a shot!

    Then, because that did NOT take very long at all, we decided to flip the paper over and do a poetry selection, as well.  Using our easels, our funky hand-hold, and our new technique of ‘not too sketchy, not too straight’, we did THIS poem:

    Jemima

    (Sometimes attributed to Longfellow)

    There was a little girl,
    and she had a little curl,
    right in the middle of her forehead.

    And when she was good,
    she was very, very good,
    but when she was bad,
    she was horrid.

    One day she went upstairs
    while her parents, unawares, 
    in the kitchen down below
    were at their meals.

    And she stood upon her head,
    on her little trundle bed,
    and she then began hurraying 
    with her heels.

    Her mother heard the noise,
    and thought it was the boys,
    a-playing at a combat
    in the attic.

    But when she climbed the stair
    and saw Jemima there,
    she took her and did spank her
    most emphatic!   

    NoTeS:  Interestingly, nobody did a drawing of a spankin’.  All except Lydia drew a little girl kicking her feet against the wall. Well… it is a vivid image, LoL!!  Brian added a cat, Ethan added a mother, and Isaac added transformers under the bed (naturally).  But y’know what?  I *HATE* the way my editing program handles these.  I’m trying to score an Adobe Photoshop 4 off eBay that’ll boot up to my system in a compatibility mode, because… it took THREE different programs just to do this, and they all stink.  Yeah, well.  Hopefully that’ll be fixed, soon.  Still, if you want to enlarge, you know to click, right?

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