Teach me to Draw!
There is a lost vocabulary of drawing that it seems most art teaching has forgotten to formally impart any longer. I have a sense that this was more common practice in formal art schooling in some bygone era, since it seems to be common knowledge to a lot of old school illustrators, animators and designers, but less well articulated in my experience in highschool art and college art programs in the 90’s and 2000’s. It seems like if you miss this vocabulary you’re doomed to stumble around trying to discover it by trial and error or stitch it together from other “creative” art lessons.
This approach is essentially a thinly veiled sneaky way to teach kids (or beginner adults!) basic artistic draftsmanship. It’s not really about creativity, although flair and personal style inevitably happen in any drawing practice. Instead it has a motivation of teaching the art equivalent of the musical scales. That being, in my opinion, how to represent volume on the page by using and manipulating basic forms.
The number one manual of basic forms in my opinion is a little booklet that was given to me in highschool which I rediscovered in my 20’s and 30’s. It helped me to shore up my fundamental understanding of forms and to teach forms to anyone of any age.
The Booklet is about $15 and is just a stapled 5.5×8.5 booklet called The Drawing Textbook which can be ordered through this site:
http://audiovisualdrawingprogram.com/
It’s written to the teacher, but can be used directly by any student with a keen interest.
Nikki Dreamer Illustration 