Welcome back!
For the second project, our students did a series of line studies. Let me first inform you where we got our inspiration from.
Le Taureau is a series of lithographs by Pablo Picasso made with the assistance of Fernand Mourlot from December 1945 to January 1946. The series depicts a bull as it is progressively refined through 11 images to the simplest rendering of form. The eleventh and final image was created on January 17th. Mourlot believed this was the bull in its “essential form”, having been “rendered in a few perfectly placed lines… with his pinhead and ridiculous horns like antennae”. Mourlot recalled that his workers “regretted seeing such a magnificent bull transformed bit by bit into a sort of insect”.
After our students learned about Pablo Picasso’s Le Taureau, they practiced line drawing with charcoal and pen. Students first familiarized themselves with charcoal and charcoal paper.
They used different thicknesses of charcoal and experimented on how different thicknesses form different types of lines. The students also tried to use corners, edges, and the sides of the charcoal to create different depths as well. They learned how to make different line weights, how to smudge the charcoal, as well as different types of charcoal such as willow charcoal and compressed charcoal.
In addition, students also used pen and erasers to create negative space and further variety in design. They were able to then create tonal form with the different skills they learned.
All of these exercises led to our mini project, which was drawing a rooster from direct observation. We first had them draw the contour line of a rooster. Students knew how to draw contour lines from the first lesson so this came fairly easily to them.
We also then practiced drawing different shapes and forms with the pencil. The basic shapes were further developed with the pencil and then led to the final project which was developing the rooster.
Our little artists learned how to use charcoal, pastel, and developed their observation skills all within a couple of classes. Although the final project may seem like a simple drawing of a rooster, the steps our students took to ultimately create the final project really helped to develop foundation skills.
This Fall 2021 semester is the first time our students are able to take classes on campus. Because all classes were help online for the past year and a half, our directors and instructor really worked hard to create a curriculum to have our students be able to interact with other students and create a strong foundation as they come back to campus.
Just as we used our skills from the first lesson on this project, we will also be using the skills from this lesson on our next project! Stay tuned to see our next project - it’s a fun one!