unit 1 gesture and contour drawing!. types of drawing and line gesture – captures...

Unit 1

Gesture and Contour Drawing!

Types of drawing and line

• Gesture – Captures interiors/Flow/Motion• Blind contour – tests memory, outlines• Line contour – detailed outlines• Cross contour – interior and exterior shapes

through lines• Hatching – building interior and exterior

volume through tight and widely spaced lines

Kickstart with some gestures• Gesture drawing is exactly what it sounds like.• You make sweeping gestures in a sketchy quality to

capture the basic movement or form of your subject.

• Great way to capture motion or the “core” of your topic.

• Heavy lines add weight and solidity, lighter can make connections and add to details and highlights.

• Think of the first big chops a or sculptor woodworker used to chop out the general shape of their piece.

With charcoal or pencilLine Quality:

• Should be tangled and overlapping

• should be spontaneously and energetically stated

• May look like a scribble• It is not a meaningless

scribble• All lines are based on

observation

• Break the figure into some basic shapes• Cylinders - legs, arms• Boxes - upper and lower torso, head• Spheres – head - hands

Paying attention to the formBlind contour line drawing

• Careful observation drawing without looking at you pen or paper

• continuous line• develops hand and eye coordination• improves concentration• removes judgment of what you are seeing• allows you to consider edges• consider direction• consider open and closed form• recognize repeated shapes and rhythms

90/10 drawing 90%not looking 10%looking to catch finer details.

Tips for contour drawing

• Track your subject with your eyes.• Wherever you are looking, your hand should

be producing a line.• As your eyes and hand should be working

simultaneously .• This isn’t about an accurate or even “good”

drawing

Sighted Contour Line Drawing• Draw slowly and deliberately NOT sketchy• Contour line drawings are made up of only lines, NO

shading• Lines should follow the contours of your still life object(s)• You can modify the line quality, thickness of the line –

darker lines for major lines, lighter lines for soft implied edges

• A contour is the line which defines a form or edge – an outline.

• Following the visible edges of a shape. • The contour describes the outermost edges of a form, as

well as dramatic changes of plane within the form .

Cross contour• Cross contour lines are

drawn lines, which travel, as the name suggests, across the form.

• Cross contours may be horizontal or vertical, as on the right side of the example, or both.

• Often, in more complex forms, cross-contours will be drawn at varying angles.

SHADING

• Shading is used in drawing for depicting levels of darkness on paper by applying media more densely or with a darker shade for darker areas, and less densely or with a lighter shade for lighter areas.

Cross-Hatching

• There are various techniques of shading including cross hatching where perpendicular lines of varying closeness are drawn in a grid pattern to shade an area. The closer the lines are together, the darker the area appears. Likewise, the farther apart the lines are, the lighter the area appears.

• Light patterns, such as objects having light and shaded areas, help when creating the illusion of depth on paper.

Cross Hatching• When “Hatched” lines are placed at an angle

to one another, it is called cross-hatching.

Hatching

• artistic technique used to create tonal or shading effects by drawing (or painting or scribing) closely spaced parallel lines.

• Artists use the technique, varying the length, angle, closeness and other qualities of the lines, most commonly in drawing, linear painting and engraving.

Silhouette

• A silhouette is the image of a person, animal, object or scene represented as a solid shape of a single color, usually black, its edges matching the outline of the subject. The interior of a silhouette is featureless, and the whole is typically presented on a light background, usually white, or none at all. The silhouette differs from an outline which depicts the edge of an object in a linear form, while a silhouette appears as a solid shape.