Beetroot which is one of mine and my nieces’ favourite vegetables was the subject for the Creative Drawing class (3.10.13). With the nice harsh edges and textures of the beetroot itself and then the softer edges of the leaves, we mainly focused on the different techniques of drawing today. In addition to the beetroot, a dragon randomly appeared in one of my drawings, see if you can spot him!
To get warmed up we drew the beetroot as we would normally. An 8B pencil was the weapon of choice for this exercise.
Obviously this was too easy so to make things a little bit difficult and to test out our arm muscles, we taped our pencil to a stick (length 60cm). We all had a piece of paper taped to the wall and we drew our beetroots standing up with our extended pencils! This was a new way for us to draw and took a bit of getting used to! Unable to get any kind of specific detail we concentrated more on the shape and layout of the beetroot.
The next image was drawn in a similar fashion but this time using a 30cm stick and charcoal taped to it rather than pencil. I cheated a little and smudged the shadows as it was quite difficult to get the shading quite right. The image did end up quite dark due to being a bit heavy handed with the charcoal!
Our next challenge (with the paper happily back on the table) we used a pencil but we held it right at the end so that we lacked our normal control of the pencil and had to again concentrate on mark making rather than focusing on the detail of the beetroot.
The final image we also had to hold the pencil in the same position as you would hold a cutlery knife. This was fine until we all forgot how we normally hold a knife and had to actually get a cutlery knife to help us work out our hand position. It also seemed a bit easier if you pretended to have a fork in the other hand! This again limited our normal drawing powers!
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I can see the dragons!