Drawing Tutorial: Black and White + Pointillism

**For my brother -- and anyone else who's interested :)**

My brother was recently despairing his lack of drawing skills. A week ago, a 10-year-old at school was accusing me of being 'too good' at drawing.

However, I remember being in their shoes -- bemoaning the disparity between what I could see in my mind's eye and the terrible scribble that came out of the end of my pencil.

Now I have tips (allbeit only a few, as I am still nearer the beginning than the end of the journey to good drawing/art skills) for the former + the encouragement that patience + practice (in the current case, 18 years more worth of it) will help.

Here are some reflections on my artistic training at the Waldorf Teacher Seminar a few years ago and what I've been trying since.

Black and White* (with charcoal / chalk)
We used pointillism, + while it requires patience, it produced very encouraging results, there were no frustratingly misplaced lines, there were just dots and the forms could be produced or redirected/corrected dot-by-dot. :)

The 1st exercise: cover the surface in points, roughly evenly spaced

Purpose:

• to grasp/feel the entire paper + leave no section 'unseen' or empty
• prepare/provide the background; therefore the first step when beginning a piece
• **This is the FIRST STEP for all of the following exercises**

Please excuse the shadows of the skull behind the paper ;) -- for the skull, see below.

2nd exercise: create an even gradiant from light to dark

Purpose:

• train the eye + the hand to work evenly + gradually
• + to create contrast

3rd exercise: let the points become more dense at certain points in order to create separate blobs (very technical term, I know ;) ) -- they should be roughly evenly-spaced

Purpose:

• practice seeing the whole surface + spacing the blobs evenly
• use pointillism to increase their density/darkness

4th exercise: let the points become more dense around certain areas of whiteness/lightness in order to surround those blobs

Purpose:

• practice seeing the whole surface + spacing the absence of significant dots or blobs evenly
• use pointillism to increase the density of the borders

One can see the harder/finer charcoal used here in comparison with the softer/wider charcoal used in the previous piece

5th exercise: Combine the previous two exercises with a fluid border

Purpose:

• Again practice the even spacing of the ambiguous forms

6th exercise: Begin by placing dots evenly all over the surface and then see where they seem to 'become' more dense (of course, you are placing the dots, but in some places they will seem to lend themselves to further 'densifying') Then let your mind see the patterns and pictures and encourage them.

Purpose:

• use pointillism to create concrete, recognizable forms (as opposed to abstract ones as in previous exercises)

Version 1: Using hard/fine charcoal

Version 2: Using soft/wide charcoal

I can't remember the exact order of the following exercises, but I will approximate..

7th exercise: Again we started by grasping/seeing/nominally-working-on the whole surface and then we were supposed to let a border appear, one that was densest at the border and then became less dense as it moved away.

Purpose:

• practice gradation with white on black

8th exercise: Let the dots become more dense in certain areas + 'densify' into edges of objects. Similar to exercise 6 but now with white on black. We are marking the light as opposed to the shadow.

Purpose:

• practice creating abstract forms with light

My imagination created a cave with dragons :) Several of my fellow students found extra-terrestrial bodies.

9th exercise: Again let the dots densify to create abstract objects; decide on a light source and create a 3-dimensional effect with shading (or in this case, show what is best-lit)

Purpose:

• practice shading or showing what is well-lit
• practice creating a 3-dimensional look

I think the thing in the upper-left is a cat lying on its back, but everything else is quite fantastical :)

10th exercise: Draw this starkly-lit sphere.
(Here we talked about shadow patterns and how the darkest points often appear right next to the lightest points --and in order to show the lightest surface where the light was shining on the sphere, we had to 'approach' it with points from the surrounding area/background. So I wasn't drawing a line to show where the sphere ended, I was dotting the background, what wasn't well-lit sphere. I sat on this forever!!! And I still didn't feel like I was done, but I wanted to move on to the next exercise. So many tiny dots. . . )

Purpose:

• practice shading with pointillism on a uniformly colored object (in this case, a clay sphere)
• create a sphere using points, both showing what is sphere and what is not sphere (in this case, the background)

11th exercise: Draw a skull using poitillism. (In this case a human skull seen from behind)

Purpose:

• practice shading on an uneven but still fairly uniformly-colored object

12th exercise: Draw a scene in nature, again with pointillism

Purpose:

• practice pointillism with a variety of sizes, depths, and light/dark values

In my case you can somewhat see the bird house by the stump of the willow tree and the crossed beams of the bridge. However I got distracted by the next attempt at this exercise and so didn't pursue this one further.

Unfortunately I don't seem to have my 2nd version of this exercise..perhaps it is still hanging in the teacher seminar? It did end up turning out quite well -- It was a (surprise, surprise) macro drawing of some bricks on the walk with snow partially covering them. It was delightful to 'draw' with fine dots the bricks and the barest outlines of the partially covered bricks...I'll have to go looking for it.


*Fun Fact: One of my parents' favorite German terms is the term for black-and-white or "schwarzweiß" (pronounced sh-v-ah-ts-v-eye-ss) I believe they learned it from listening to Berlitz tapes to prepare to pick up my aunt from her mission that she served for our church in Czechoslovakia (when the parts were still one country). On the way there or back they stopped in Germany + wanted to, at least, be able to buy the proper film for their cameras :) )