Warm-up Drawing Exercise: Making Stronger Drawings
By Paula Briggs
When working with children (or adults!) we try to do lots of mark making exercises to encourage them to use the whole range of values a pencil can make – from the palest to the darkest lines. We tried this drawing exercise at the beginning of a book art session, as a way to help the children understand how they could make really strong, powerful and confident drawings, rather than the tentative marks which some children naturally make. The children loved it!
I developed the idea of using the personality of the paper to help shape the drawing in a second exercise, which I did the following week: Exercise for Making an Artist’s Book / Sketchbook
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Beth K
May 4, 2022 @ 9:57 pm
I like the idea of this exercise but I don’t have maps laying around and I am going to try to pick some up before I teach this in person. I can also download maps and I was wondering if there were any alternative media that you would suggest if I can’t get maps for this project.
Paula
May 13, 2022 @ 8:59 am
Using newspapers can work too? Anything with text in the background? Even an old book you can take apart? Obviously different aesthetics but same principle…
Jo B
July 15, 2022 @ 11:50 am
You can buy road maps of the UK fairly cheaply in most garages (under a fiver usually) – you could just cut these up and have enough for a class set of 30 x A5 maps.