Introduction to Basic Drawing Lecture

Hi, good morning. This is Lois DeWitt. And this is the introduction to basic drawing lessons in free online art classes.com and this is sort of what I do with my students in my actual classes that I teach. I give them a rundown of what they're going to be learning in a four, six or eight week session. The basic drawing lessons on free online art classes are six lessons. And to start with, we talk a lot about the materials that you will use. The sketchbook, the pencils. Taking time to learn the lessons is really important. As an instructor, I can give you the information, show you how to develop your skills and techniques, but in the long run, it takes time to learn these things. And anytime that you spend with these lessons and taking the time to develop your skills and techniques is definitely in your best interest. It gives you the leverage to develop the information that you are receiving through the lessons. The next thing that we talk about is the basic shading exercises and the preliminary doodling exercise. And I say doodling, everybody rolls their eyes. It's like, what the heck is this drawing? Or what? But the doodling exercise, over the years I've been teaching, I found that it is really important because it loosens people up. It gives them confidence in their imagination and shows them that even though they're going to be working on a lot of skills and techniques, that they can actually do a really good, imaginative, awesome drawing just by doodling. And then I show them how. And if I'm working with a group, we pass this exercise around so people see different things in it and develop it differently. It becomes a wonderful group effort. The first lesson is all about learning how to shade, which is one of the prime skills to learn in drawing. And shading techniques are done with just shading, basic shapes like pyramids, circles and squares, assigning a certain light source to it. And then I show you step by step how to do the shading so that the basic geometrical shape actually becomes a volume. It's at this point then that we go into other shading techniques. Yes, you can use dots as shading and you can use just lines as shading. These are basic art school exercises that I put the students through so that they know that it's not just cross hatching and shading, but they can actually shade with dots and lines. Now, the shading exercises alone will take quite a bit of time, and I find that students have to work really hard to get these all done. And they have now developed some skill in shading, which is good at this point. However, I always Notice that there is a dialogue going on with some students more than others, that they really feel a little challenged. They feel that they really. The results that they're getting aren't what they expected. They expected to draw. Now they're two or three weeks into the drawing class, and they still don't feel that they can draw well. They really can't draw yet, but they're developing lot of really good techniques. And until the whole. The whole learning process is over, sometimes students don't realize that when it all comes together, yes, they can actually draw now and be good at it. So at this point, I usually take everybody aside and I give them a little lecture just about how their personal dialogue should be, how they should talk to themselves. There is kind of a left brain, right brain conflict. Always the left brain being very logical and wanting to define everything, and the right brain being the creative part. So these two things come together. It's sometimes for some students, a really battle to overcome that dialogue that freezes them up and talks negatively to them and say, I can't really do this. And then they just walk to quit. So I say, like, be very aware of the way you talk to yourself through all of these lessons. Don't go into the negative. Don't criticize yourself. There is actually, in the creative brain, no right or wrong, no real judgmental, critical things that are important in the learning process. The learning process is a matter of developing a skill and then being able to use it. And when you're creating, you really don't want to go into a negative dialogue, putting yourself down and saying, oh, I can't do this. Especially in a group, when that kind of dialogue kind of becomes viral and feeds everybody else. And pretty soon everybody's sitting around shrugging and feeling bad. So positive talking is really important. And that's that little lecture that I say, talk positive, Talk positively to yourself. Encourage yourself. I encourage you. Listen to me. Believe me what I'm saying. I've only been doing this for 40 years. So once we get the positive, negative conflict out of the way, I go into drawing what you see. And this is the real challenge, because without being able to see properly, a person really can't draw. I know there's a lot of information out there that says you can learn how to draw an eye, learn how to draw a hand, learn how to draw a tree, learn how to draw this, learn how to draw that. Well, that's. That's not really drawing. It's just following a map that somebody gives you. It's like the mother bird feeding the little bird. You know, there's a little bit of nourishment there. But until the bird goes out on its own, flies out of the nest and starts fending for itself, it's not really. It doesn't really have any skills. So what I've learned over the years is that the most important thing that students can learn in drawing, in any other creative art instruction is to learn how to see. And that actually is a stage, certain way of seeing accurately so that you can put down what you see. The pencil gauge method is what you will find on free online art classes. But there's also another video that I did called Drawing what yout See. And that is using a grid. And it shows you a step by step, really important aid to learning how to see properly. And repeating that exercise and over and over again will help you develop your cognitive and visual skills so that you'll be able to see and draw anything. Once you learn that you can draw anything, you can draw hand, tree, the planet Mars, whatever you want to draw. And you don't have to keep feeding off somebody just telling you, yeah, I'm going to show you how to draw an eye or show you how, how to draw a hat. You can do it yourself. The most important thing also with learning this skill is that essentially you are the artist and the creative part of you wants to come out. So if you're following the recipe or map of somebody said this is how you do something, that part of you never really comes out because you're not permitted to apply your own personal development and knowledge and visualization. I found it teaching the shading techniques and then also drawing what you see, learning that and learning how to have the correct mindset for drawing, which I think is really important. You go on and at that point in the lessons you're able to address subject matter and so forth. Lesson four is a line drawing. And that's a really good exercise to learn how to be very specific with a line. It absolutely has so much value for drawing. And then you go on to lesson five and lesson six. The last lessons will be. One will be a self portrait. That is always a challenge, but by then students have that and you will too will have those techniques and skills available so that you can go ahead and look at yourself and start drawing yourself and shade your image. And then the last one is landscape. And landscape I always leave to last because there is a lot more usually to landscape than any other subject matter. There is trees and buildings and sky and water and all kinds of things. But at the end of that sixth lesson in free online art classes, you should be able to draw fairly well if you practice. These six lessons give you all the skills you need. They give you the proper mindset so you know what you have to be thinking in order to get the most most out of the lessons. So now it's time for you to take the lessons. I've given you the intro like I give my students when I'm teaching here, and so you can go ahead and do the lessons now. So, like all of the lessons I've written in free online art classes, they're information rich, will give you the skills and techniques and mindset that you will need for basic drawing. And the best thing, of course, is it's totally free. There is absolutely no cost to these.