Introduction To Drawing

It is already week 5 and in our Fundamentals of Make-Up and Hair Design lesson we did basic drawing and shading. I have no problem with this area of design since I used to go to an Art College and this was something we did on a daily basis. 
What do you need for drawing? A sketching pad (we use an A3 sketching pad) and sketching pencils. When it comes to shading, you have to have a variety of pencils. B (2B,3B,4B etc.) stands for Black, and H (2H,3H,H4 etc.) stands for Hardness. The numbers say how hard of black the pencil is. H pencils have a harder lead which means the lines will bi lighter and B's have a softer lead which means the lines will be darker. An HB pencil, which is used mostly for writing, is in the middle of both H and B pencils. There is also an F pencil (the F does not stant for anything) and it is the halfway point between a HB and B pencil.

The Master Of Drawing
Leonardo da Vinci is by far one of the best artist of all times. In his most famous drawing, "Vitruvian Man" (1490) in pen and ink on paper, he is showing a man in two positions - with his arms and legs apart and inscribed in a square and a circle. Leonardo wanted to prove what the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius wrote in his third book of his treatise De Architectura. Vitruvius wrote that the ideal human propotions are based on the Classical orders of architecture and that the human body should be 8 heads high. The drawing was named in his honour. 

"Vitruvian Man", L. da Vinci 

(1490)

(source: http://leonardodavinci.stanford.edu/submissions/clabaugh/history/leonardo.html -date: Nov 1st 2014)

The second drawing that I really like is "Study of a Lily". Leonardo loved nature and in this drawing we can see how he studied every detail of lily; buds, blossoms, staments. and pistils. The technique he used was chalk and ink, and by adding the shadows he made the drawing look very realistic and 3D. 

 

"Study of a Lily", L. da Vinci

(c. 1480)

(source: http://www.ivc.edu/academics/schoolFA/arthistory/Documents/art2526projects/davinci_f07/page/analysis.html -date: Nov 1st 2014)

Lines and Shapes

Since we were doing the basics of drawing we started from the key elements of every drawing - lines and shapes. First we drew vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines, then moved onto shapes - circle, square, triangle etc. 
It is important to use your whole arm and not just your wrist when drawing, that way your lines will be straight and neat. I think the easiest way to make a straight line is to imagine or make a dot where is the line going to end and just focus on that spot, when drawing the line. It was a bit harder to draw straight lines since the room we were in had no tables and we had to hold the pads in our laps.

 vertical and horizontal lines

 diagonal lines

 triangles and squares

 circles

 ellipse

 Shading
For shading you use all the B pencils. When doing the shadows you need to think where the light would naturally hit the object and try to make it look as real as possible. It is always better to start from the lightest parts of the object, that way it will be easier to make the shadows more gradutate and if necessary, darker. One thing they thaught me at college was to always leave at least one white patch. Even if the object is black, the place where light hits it the most will seem white.
The homework was to find an object and draw it. I chose the pot that I keep my tea in which is a shaped as a cilinder.

 graduated shading

shapes and shadows

cilinder, sphere, cube 

 a pyramid

a cone

homework 

(27th Oct 2014 - all images above)

http://www.leonardoda-vinci.org/ (date: Nov 1st 2014)
http://www.ivc.edu/academics/schoolFA/arthistory/Documents/art2526projects/davinci_f07/page/analysis.html (date: Nov 1st 2014)