The Preliminary Sketch

Measuring, composition, organizational line,

Why Do Artists Draw?

• 1. To Record: thoughts, concepts, quickly

Example of anArtist’s sketchbook:A way to keep drawings and notes together for an artist.

• 2. Artists draw to practice their technical skills.

• Or to try out the media before beginning a final work.

• 3. Drawing is an immediate form of expression for artists.

Educational Use of Drawing

• Artists use drawing to learn how to recreate what they see

Preliminary sketch

• Preparatory drawing that precedes the final finished drawing

• Useful for working out problematic areas and design elements

• COMPOSITION: the spatial property resulting from the arrangement of parts in relation to each other and to the whole

Ingres preliminary drawing for a painting

Setting up the composition

THUMBNAIL SKETCHES: Crude, small pencil drawings used to develop the initial concept for a design

Organizational line drawings

1. Create three thumbnail sketches. 2. Try to get everything you see in the still life.3. Choose one to enlarge.4. Define your drawing by creating an imaginary

crop off point around the area. 5. With different level of pencils, draw the still life

working from lighter to darker pencil.6. Sketch out main areas of the composition first,

with little to no details. 7. Work your way to darker pencils, lines and

more definition.

Varieties of Line

• contour line. The visible border of an object in space

• Describes the changes in volume, shape, texture, color and light with the use of line.

Cross-hatching. Two or more sets of roughly parallel and overlapping lines, set at an angle to one another, in order to create a sense of three-dimensional, modeled space