6th Grade Observational Drawing

Drawing is a fundamental art skill. Many other artistic disciplines are built on the ability to represent images in line. Sixth graders undertook a series of exercises designed to aid their drawing ability by helping to improve the way they observe the world around them for their drawing purposes. The exercises build up from careful and close observation to larger compositional and overview observations. Below you will find pieces from specific exercises by students who elected to display them as part of their show work.

The exercises were:

Blind contour drawing – This exercise involves “tracing” the contours, or edges, of a subject with the eyes while mimicking those movements with a pencil on paper. The artist does not remove their eyes from the subject, so they do not look at the drawing while it is in process. The point is to help improve the careful observation skills and to help the eyes and hand work together.

Flipped image drawing – By drawing from an image that has been turned upside down you help confuse the preconceived notions of what we believe something looks like so that we can look more carefully and discern the reality of what we observe.

Negative space drawing – This exercise helps teach you to see the entirety of a composition, and begins to teach a draw-er that there are no parts of a drawing that are “not included.”

Speed or gesture drawing – This type of drawing helps a draw-er learn to break a subject down into more fundamental forms both for planning and composition, as well as learning to look at more complex subjects from a more simple starting point.

Grid drawing – This final exercise showed students how to use a basic grid overlaying an image to plan proportion and location by laying in the basic structure of a drawing via a reference guide.

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Oren Casriel