BlogHide Resteemsmikeville (70)in art • last monthSimple pencil/marker/watercolor design for kidsWe started a new class this month and I am going back to the basics with this new crew of students. One of the main things that I encourage them to do when they are starting out is to create a…mikeville (70)in art • 3 months agoA student made a portrait sketch and asked me to guessI haven't been told if I am correct or not about this sketch that a student made of someone famous and asked me to guess who it was. I enjoyed the way that she was so secretive about the portrait…mikeville (70)in art • 4 months agoFree-hand drawing from a studentWe started out using the grid system which is simply an app on a tablet that will draw a grid on any image and allow the artist to replicate it on another piece of paper so that the art becomes more…mikeville (70)in art • 5 months agoSketch turned watercolor by a studentWe have moved on from watercolors recently and were focusing almost entirely on pencils and were about to move over to charcoal as well to mix things up for the students. Every now and then a…mikeville (70)in drawing • 5 months agoAnother impressive portrait drawn by a pre-teen studentIn the next week or so we are going to move to more advanced materials in our art lessons. One of the major things is going to be charcoal instead of just lead pencils. This can be a bit of a…mikeville (70)in art • 6 months agoStages of a portrait sketchNow that we have been working with a grid system for quite a while I wanted to challenge the students to try to do a portrait free-hand and not use the grid. I find the grid very helpful when…mikeville (70)in art • 6 months agoStudents embracing the "grid system" for learning to draw portraitsFor many experienced artists, the "grid system" can be seen as cheating and I suppose it is and wasn't available to us as artists until recent times. Be that as it may, doing faces or difficult…mikeville (70)in art • 7 months agoFrustration with art: It's going to happenIn my weekly free classes that I teach to mostly children we sometimes see some extreme levels of frustration emerge from the participants. I don't push the kids to perform or anything like that…mikeville (70)in art • 8 months agoGoing above and beyond in a sketchMy students have seriously embraced the tactic I taught them about doing pencil sketches first, then going back over the lines with a felt tip pen and lastly, adding some color to the pictures.…mikeville (70)in art • 8 months agoQuick sketch of a castle by a studentI'm pretty confident that all children are fascinated by castles and will draw them at some point. I know that when I was a kid that I engaged in that sort of thing as well. I have this one…mikeville (70)in art • 9 months agoThe unimportance of realism with people in your basic paintings: silly is fun!A lot of the students in my classes are easily frustrated with how difficult it can be to accurately represent people or even animals in their drawings and painting especially when they are first…mikeville (70)in art • 9 months agoStudent does a watercolor with much more detail than I was expectingI teach a free art class twice a week for mostly children. We are open to all ages but the adults that turn up quickly start to feel embarrassed that they are in a room with a bunch of kids 8-14…mikeville (70)in sketching • 9 months agoAsked my students to do a sketch and see if I can guess who it isWe work on mostly simple stuff here in my classes but I also have focused about 20% of our time on the intricacies of the human face. It really is alarming how many differences there are in one…mikeville (70)in art • 9 months agoHighlighted student artwork from my classesI teach free classes for the community here once or twice a week and for the most part the students are children. We have had an adult or two stop in every now and then but I think they felt a bit…mikeville (70)in art • 10 months agoA student "quick sketch" followed by some minor watercolorsI have this little trick that I use on my students to try to get their creative side to emerge. Unlike with most other disciplines in life, I feel that art is something that shouldn't be overly…mikeville (70)in painting • 10 months agoTrying watercolors without sketching with pencils and pen firstMostly, I have my students get a picture ready by first using pencils to get an outline and then filling in what they would like to color with a felt tip pen. This creates more of a "paint by…mikeville (70)in art • 11 months agoGoing back to basics with watercolorsMy students were getting kind of tired of working on portraits so we returned to something that most of them really love doing because it is easy and cheap for them to do in their own time when they…mikeville (70)in art • 11 months agoTrying portrait drawing without grids after weeks of grid trainingWe have been working on portraits in my classes lately because I feel that the human face is one of the most complicated things to get "right" in art. There are a lot of schools of thought out…mikeville (70)in art • 11 months agoMore grid template portraitsA student devised an adaptation of the grid program and I was quite proud of them for innovating on something that I taught them about. It shows that the students aren't just doing it because I…mikeville (70)in drawing • last yearGrid program for another pencil portraitIt was a bit of a gamble on my part but the students have really taken to using a grid program that I introduced them to in order to do what I consider to be one of the most difficult things in…
