Feature

Students almost always skip two simple yet essential steps when drawing their subjects, pecking away at the details in frustration.

Accuracy is almost always at the heart of why students are not satisfied with their work. Yet they will often reject the need to stop and analyze for a moment before beginning. Even when they know the failure to produce accurate work causes them the most anxiety. 

The three steps really work. This is because they are based on the very things that the most accurate artists instinctively do every single time they begin to draw. If you watch a master artist at work, you’ll notice that they stop drawing and look at their subject intently – well over half of the time they’re working. By contrast a student will only glance at it a few times here and there.

Watch this video of Monet painting to see what I mean. He’s looking mainly for color and light accuracy at this point, but still, he turns and looks every couple of brush strokes.

So what is a master artist doing with all that staring?

He is analyzing his subject and finding relationships between the frame, the big shapes, and details in what he is trying to depict.

Proportions and placement are key to accuracy. The idea of proportion is difficult to teach. Ask anyone what it means and they say, “of course”, but ask them to explain it and they’ll have trouble. It gets even more difficult trying to explain it to younger children who need more concrete instructions. Proportion is an abstract concept. But the way to begin is to make the distinction between one measurement, and proportion, which is the comparison of two measurements.

The September lesson, 3 Steps To Accuracy, will help your students greatly. Teaching the 3 steps though, can backfire on you when students simply reject the method.

It’s important to realize that a lot of your students (and everyone else in the world), believe in the Harry Potter version of artists. You have to be born a wizard, and everyone gets different amounts of wizardness to work with. While there is some truth to this when it comes to various giftings that make art easier for some, it results in a magical kind of thinking about oneself. The students then feel they can reject any difficult or boring parts, believing that if they have the magic, then they don’t need practice or methods. That also leads to students who have many gifts, but who won’t practice or use helpful methods, to become disheartened and eventually quit making art altogether. They lose the hope that their magic is good enough.

If you’re still having trouble convincing students to follow your guidance, you can pull the trust card out: “do you trust me?”

Another key point to use when teaching the 3 Steps is to make sure students know how quick the first two steps are. Frame proportions take 5% of your time, and big shapes are about the same. Then 90% of detail drawing is far more enjoyable!

One more note. I know that traditionally the method to help students look at their subject more often than their drawing paper is to have them do a blind contour drawing. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I actually never use this method. I have found that students don’t have trouble looking at details. The exercise emphasizes details over the accuracy, which is the opposite of what they need to learn. The resulting contour drawings are a testament to the fact that without proportion and placement, details alone never produce accurate work.

Encouragement is emotional and is felt by students rather than understood. That means you can’t use logical arguments to encourage anyone. It also means you can’t just walk up to a student who hates their work and say, “but I think it’s awesome! You should be proud”.

Some parents do this to almost every single thing a young artist produces, and it makes the child lose trust in their evaluation. But more importantly, giving praise when a student doesn’t like their work, contradicts the student’s emotions. You’re telling them one of 3 things: 1) They can’t evaluate artwork well, 2) You can’t evaluate artwork well, or 3) You’re lying to them about evaluating their artwork.

Since they usually believe they are evaluating their work well, that means you are either a bad evaluator or are lying. You become an untrustworthy advisor.

Reveal Insights

Our lessons are full of helpful insights, such as the 3 Steps To Accuracy. Every time you reveal something, you’re opening new doors in a student’s abilities, and if they see even a tiny bit of immediate progress, they’re very encouraged.

Demonstrate Techniques

Just show them. Nothing is more encouraging than sitting down with a student and changing their technique with a quick demo that solves a problem they’re having.

Our lessons are full of video demos you can learn or display.

Ask Questions

It takes practice to stop telling people what’s wrong and start asking what they think is wrong. Almost every art school and curriculum is dependent on the critique, where the masters hack the students to pieces telling them what they didn’t do right. It’s the opposite of encouragement.

Speak Truth & Find The Good Stuff

Don’t say something you don’t believe. Find an element on the artwork that you think is good, and point that out. You’re telling the truth!

When I was young, the gigantic department store, Sears, started selling paintings; real paintings; made by real artists. Well, sort of.

The paintings were hand-painted, but they were obviously made in an assembly line. The art was pretty basic. They had no personal vision and little self expression. It was mostly flowers painted with a fast and furious technique. A lot of people thought they could never afford original art, and this seemed like something they could enhance their homes with and be proud of.

They sold very well. However, the paintings never had the prestige that their purchasers hoped for. They were immortalized some years later in the song, An Italian Restaurant, by Billy Joel. They became an easy target for a joke.

Today you’ll see similar paintings in some gift shops. These are sometimes painted by individuals, and sometimes they’re still assembly line work. They and are fairly cliche. You get the feeling that the same basic painting is in another few hundred places on another few hundred walls. Maybe by this very same artist.

Hang in there, I am going somewhere with this.

So, as a teacher, I bring my own experience into the classroom. I can’t change how I view things. What I can do, however, is learn. Here’s a little story about learning and patience that always gets me smiling, and even a little teary.

I just needed to give a little background first.

We had a student who was around 11 or 12, and had been in our program for a while. I’ll call her Ellie for this story. When she began, Ellie showed great interest, and a little bit of the various combination of natural tendencies and gifts we commonly refer to as talent. After a couple of years and going through all of our Foundations lessons, she began copying other paintings.

We don’t have our students copy the old masters very often, because it can easily become a crutch. It can get frustrating. We only copy every now and then, and we encourage a return to original work.

But that is copying the world’s greatest works! When Ellie first started copying paintings, well, you guessed it. They looked like paintings from Sears. It was disturbing to see all that effort go into copying something that was pretty low on the art scale to begin with. My first reaction was to shout, “no! don’t do that.”

But she loved them so much! These blah paintings of 3 or 5 flowers on a streaky background looked wonderful to her 12-year old aesthetic. She worked hard on them and was very proud. We looked closely at what she was doing, and you could see that these were amazing for someone her age.

You could begin to see the hints of greatness if you looked past the cliche. After a few paintings, she was producing better work than the originals.

So we waited.

We encouraged.

Two years later the paintings were suddenly replaced by original work. Ellie began to improve by leaps and bounds. It seems like artists would improve like a plant grows, but I’ve seen many students make a sudden shift like this. It still surprises me.

So one day, we were getting ready for our art show and Ellie brought in two works, one was a stunning oil pastel and the other was a portrait of a Japanese queen (see above) in colored pencils that I myself would be proud to have done. Her work, at only age 14, was fantastic. We had to just stop and marvel at the journey she took. It was not intuitive for us.

Since then, Ellie has graduated and gone off to art school. We expect to hear of great adventures and conquests.

We provided the foundations to a young artist; important insights and techniques, as well as freedom to express herself in her own way. We also gave her encouragement. Not just to say, “that looks good”, but to help her find her own way and answer questions. The hardest thing though, was to make sure we did not throw a big ol’ brick of stupidity into her path by telling her what we were sure was “wrong” about her work.

I told her teacher that Ellie was a jewel in her crown.

There is a flip side to this story. All of the adults who come to us for lessons invariably have a different version of this story, where they were smashed by a brick of evaluation. Every single one was told when they were young, by an art teacher, that they, “just didn’t have what it takes”, to be an artist. They were shut down, and they should not have been.

I marvel at this phenomenon. What makes a teacher tell someone they’re not an artist? Why do so many art schools and teachers feel such a keen responsibility to remove all the “weak” artists from the field? To destroy the creativity that they love?

Van Gogh would never have made it through art school.

I think one of the biggest reasons for the discouragement of anyone with a perceived “lack of talent”, is that we have a belief that only those who are exceptional can ever make it in the tough world of art. We’re all afraid of allowing a young person to become the classic “starving artist”. (I have never met a starving artist myself.) If someone appears to fall short in any way, then they must be told, so that they don’t become damaged by the cruelty of discovering that they don’t “have what it takes”. But what irony! Saying that, is guaranteeing the very damage they think they’re trying to prevent.

There is some merit to working with students in art schools and making sure that they have enough ability and training to work in their chosen field. But art students are looking for a career. That’s not all there is.

I like to dance. It’s not a stretch to say that my dancing ability is similar to a painting from Sears. I will continue to dance because I like to. We don’t tell kids to stop swimming, dancing, playing ball, or playing an instrument, because we are afraid that they “don’t have what it takes” to be a professional. If a teenager enjoys something we encourage it. Not so with art. We demand that they be great as well.

Everyone who loves making art should have access to it, and everyone who practices art sees improvement. One day, a Van Gogh or an Ellie may suddenly take off, shedding the potato eaters and emerging in a starry night. Dropping the paintings from Sears and finding personal greatness. For some, making art is simply fun, and lifts their soul. For others, it’s more: a lifelong pursuit for something that transcends the ordinary and attempts to lift the soul of others. Either way, art is a great endeavor. Who are we to make the judgment call as to what lies in the future of any young person who wants to pursue art?

Two things I’ve learned: 1) An artist will always improve, and take their work as far as they can, if encouraged properly. 2) Artists know, without a teacher telling them, when their work needs improvement. (The few that don’t, can’t be informed anyway).

materials

Kneaded Eraser

The humble kneaded eraser is known to most artists and is an essential tool. My first art teacher told me, “it needs to be kneaded, just like we all do.”

You may already know all there is to know about these little lumps of lightening, but then again…

Tips for erasing:

• Knead to clean, and then rub lightly
• Press to lift a layer of graphite or charcoal
• Pinch an edge for fine erasing or to draw an erased line

Tips for using:

1. Cleaning – Kneading the eraser is how you clean it. It doesn’t actually clean it, but it distributes the charcoal or graphite to the entire lump instead of the surface. When they’re new, it seems almost magical.

2. Extra Use – Kneading the eraser is great for stress relief. This is the artists’ original fidget device. Pulling hard will make it snap in two, but pulling a bit, releasing, and then pulling some more, can make it stretch and stretch. Folding, pinching, mashing, stretching. It’s all good.

3. Take a break and make a little sculpture for changing your attitude.

4. A sticky eraser is very dirty. Throw it away. Same goes for a dark eraser, or one that has debris embedded in it.

5. Do not allow the eraser to get on the floor or other places where there is dust and debris. That means do not use it as a tossing toy. It will bounce, so this is tempting.

6. Even a very hard eraser can be brought back to life with some kneading and stretching.

graphic

Here’s a 20″ wide poster you can print out on two sheets of copy paper and tape together. Tap the button for the PDF.

Foundations

Three Steps to Accuracy

Students will be introduced to and have a chance to use the Three Steps to Accuracy method, which is based on the way professional artists analyze what they see so that they can reproduce it accurately in artwork. There is also a paint-mixing game, and some time to finish landscapes if needed.

Foundations

Week 8: Ink and Air

Students discover (or rediscover) the good, bad, and beautiful qualities of India ink. They create a black and white ink drawing of tools, while also reviewing the Three Steps to Accuracy, and learning about Air Shapes, the Art Instructor term for the traditional (and more abstract concept), negative shapes.

Foundations

Inaccurate Painting 

Because accuracy is not always the goal, and students need to break free from boundaries, we’ll take a fun break from the structured lessons, and enjoy the freedom of self-expression. We also learn about the Most Important Spot, (or emphasis).

Foundations

Shading & Blockiness

Students learn or review the basic techniques involved in pencil shading using various textures and movement. Blocks and cubes are looked at, as an introduction to artist’s perspective and understanding of one of the 3 basic geometric forms.