Coastal floral landscape line drawing demo to color

Coastal floral landscape line drawing demo to draw and color. Try drawing this on your own, or make  up your own version. You can print this and color it too. Those are poppies in the front.

St. George Grange, Wiley’s corner. Adult art class drawing display, 9/23/19

Once you notice that a simple building almost appears as if it is a face,  faces start staring out at you from so many buildings you see. Hard not to see them. I see this building as a kind of jack-o lantern face. That porch is the jagged toothed grin.

Students worked from color photos of the building. We practiced isolating and trying to capture the various dark shapes of the roofs. One can imagine them as little origami creatures with wide open triangular mouthes. 

Class  also worked from copies of the photo converted to an outline image with superimposed grid.

Finn-Am church, St. George Peninsula, adult art class display, 9/16/19

Exercises before the final drawings, (descriptions are probably out of order):
Practice in observing and looking at things differently than we are used to. It does not matter if you do it right or wrong. It just matters that you try. We need new experiences for our sense of well being. We need the challenges.
First try drawing just the dark shapes - without using outlines. Color into imaginary outlines.

Continuous line drawing of the reference image. Drawing tool stays in contact with the paper at all times. Draw backwards if you need to get back to a spot.

Ex. Draw just the sky area. Make boundary edges but not outlines. Again, you are coloring in this shape to imaginary outlines. Do the green area too.

Do a coloring in with one dark color, but make some of the shaded areas using a different set of marks - like stripes.

Final drawing as you wish. Use the reference images. Class had photos and a digitally prepared outline over a graph.

Harjula’s Barn, along the St, George River, Rte 131, So. Thomaston Maine.

Harjula’s Barn, along the St, George River, Rte 131, So. Thomaston Maine. - adult art class student display, and maybe a lesson description. We barely touched ‘perspective’ with a ten foot pole.

Harjula’s barn lesson:

1. Look at that roof shape. You know that it is a rectangle if you were to see it from the crows POV. But you are seeing it foreshortened. That means depending on where you are in relation to the building the lines or the edges of any plane will appear to slant down to your horizon/I level or slant up to the horizon/high-level. It all depends on your vantage point. It happens because as things get further and further away from you, they appear smaller. So, for instance, if you were to look down railroad tracks, the two railroad rails would converge to a point finally. The ties would appear to get smaller and smaller the further away from you they are. That same  principle is happening with any set of parallel lines. There lies the problem in drawing a building using a feel for perspective. Your brain has it so deeply ingrained so that you know at all times what something is no matter what it looks like to your eyes, that it’s very hard to draw the illusion of an object. Your impulse is to draw the meaning of an object, your symbol for the object. But that is not what gives a convincing “Realistic“ appearance to an image. So we need to use the parameters of an artificial system to convey that illusion. It’s not a perfect system though.
2. It’s very dyslexic and mind-boggling a system to explain or teach to The lay person. I believe only a serious art student is willing to learn how to do this. And even then all that can do is inform you, because that is not where the art lies. That has nothing to do with design and pattern, which is much more important then perspective.
3. We can try a few exercises to give a ‘feel’ for form in space.
4. So we looked at the shape of the roof and tried to see it as a shape separated from the whole. It is a kind of kite shape, but all the edges I have different measurements. 
5. Start by drawing the outlines of that shape.
6. Now try to draw that shape by coloring in the shape into imaginary outlines. You will be making clean edges but you will not outline per se.
7. Practice this a few times with the roof shape.
8. Try the same practice on that long wall with the windows. Don’t connect it to a building yet.  Just isolate it by itself.
9. Now try the front wall of the barn.
10. That front wall consists of a rectangle with a triangle on top of it. That rectangle is not parallel to you it’s slanted away a little bit. The ground line slants visually up to the horizon line. The top of its rectangle slants down to the horizon line..
11. How to assess the triangle on top of that front rectangle wall? Where is the peak visually? We know that it’s over the centerline of the building. But it’s not at the midpoint of the visual length of the ground line. (Now you see why this is so dyslexic and such mind-boggling topic, ... it becomes just a slew of words that are impossible to make meaning out of!)
12. To find the peak of the building, where the apex of the triangle should be, draw crisscross lines - corner-to-corner of that rectangle of the front wall. Draw a vertical line straight up from the ground line through that intersection of the crisscross lines. You can decide how high you want your roof to be. Or you can use the photograph as a guideline for where that roof peak should be. For now we’re just trying to make a building or a barn that is somewhat functioning as a building. It has form.  It’s not leaning too badly.
13. After we had done this practicing a bit, students used an outline/coloring page of the photograph with the grid superimposed on it. It was a good sized reproduction to work from. The students were not supposed to trace from it, but to use it as a guide or a tool to draw from. Only one person tried to draw a grid beforehand so that the drawing would work just like the photo, but that left no time to do the actual drawing. (Which is why I had decided not to instruct that they should actually make the grid.) It’s simply an aid to be able to see just how certain line slant in relation to each other in the image. If you draw a grid you should be able to easily draw or map out the building onto another piece of paper. Doing this on a semi regular basis might help your ability to see buildings without needing a grid. 
14. A grid is more helpful for drawing a small sketch of your own of whatever topic you want to do and then enlarging it to a larger scale. That is how large paintings were executed long ago.
15. After the exercises, students drew their final drawings as they wished.

Lobster Boats passing Marshall Point light on their way home. Student display, adult art class, 8/26/19

We started with several exercises working from my reference photos. A) Continuous line drawings to practice flowing line. B) A silhouette or stencil style drawing of a lobsterboat. C) draw a scene using any of the reference materials.

http://catinkacards.tripod.com/pdf/ferryMarshallPtTrace.pdf

http://catinkacards.tripod.com/pdf/marshallPtBoatsRefs.pdf

Sailboat passing Rockland Breakwater lighthouse - student display, adult art class, 8/19/19

Students did some torn paper and negative space exercises before tackling the reference model. This is a little painting I did years ago. Sketching sailboats racing can only be done quickly in real time. I painted in my little drawing the next day.

Back then I had no camera that could see so far out. I could only see through binoculars. My phone camera still can't see that far out. One must draw moving objects quickly and make up the rest.

Maine Birds - children’s art class display, adults and kids, 8/20/19

Yearly visitors who have come to class since it started in 2007 came today. Always such true magic to see youngsters change year by year. Faith in the future for all gets showered on me, like the fairy dust in Peter Pan, when this family visits.

We went through four sets of drawings with so many Maine birds to draw: Owls, blue jays, eagles, loons, puffins, chickadees, cardinals, cormorants, hawks, hummingbirds, herons, pelicans, egrets.

Here is a demo drawing from years ago. You can use it as a coloring page.

Rockland Breakwater lighthouse - student display adult art class, 8/12/19

We started exercises with drawing the image in continuous line. Keep your drawing tool in constant contact with the paper. Backtrack if you must.

Next we drew the image stencil style using a dark crayon. Color in to an imaginary outline. Separate the areas and shapes by keeping white channels.

Final drawings we made, again from my ancient instamatic photo of the lighthouse taken on a ferry ride to North Haven quite a few years ago.

Walk around the corner - some flowers, the brook, puddles - 8/16/19

Camera/phone ran out of space again. Lots of flowers I would have loved to take pics of. That will perhaps give the incentive to do this again.

First there were these puddles on the sidewalk. Of course - we did have a good short rain this morning...

There were some lovely patches of clover - the kind that tastes good. And some oak leaves knocked down. I hope it is too soon for color change.

Then there was the brook. I have not looked at that for a few years.

And a magenta flox type flower, with a lovely stone wall in the background. 

On my return home i stopped at a brush pile and took a spray of curling dead leaves. I may try to draw later.

The cat greeted me when I got home. The mosquitos were after us already so we did not sit

out.

Maine farming - Belted Galloway cows and blueberry rakers. Kids art class, 8/13/19

Student display of drawings by kids and adults. We do a follow-along drawing, and then students color their drawings.

Maine blueberries are the small tart kind and coming in to peak harvest now. People buy lots of them just to pack into their freezers.

Belted Galloway cows are also called 'Oreo cookie' cows because their markings are like the cookie. Why not 'Whoopie pie' cows?

Download a PDF of 4 little Maine Farming drawings to color from previous demo's
http://catinkacards.tripod.com/pdf/maineFarmGalloBW2.pdf
Download a PDF of 4 little Maine Farming demo drawings to color.

Marshall Point Light - student art display, adult art class, 8/5/19

We started with practices in drawing some of the components that make up this lighthouse scene.

A top hat or pork pie hat and a ski cap type shapes form the lantern part of the tower.

Long triangles - (obtuse I think), get progressively longer because of perspective.

We drew them by coloring in their imaginary outlines.

After practicing, class drew from my follow along demo. They also had  reference art to work from too - the newspaper clip of my painting.

Lighthouses - Rockland Breakwater and Owls Head Light, student drawings by kids and adults, children’s art class, 8/6/19

Lupine coastal landscapes, adult art class, 7/8/19

We started with a series of exercises:
Draw clumps of stalks of lupine in a variety of
scribbles or textures. Each clump should be different than the
previous. Fill the sheet.
Rough in two horizontal panes/frames/rectangles on a vertical sheet.
First box create some shapes like areas in a landscape.
Second box make the same but fill it in with the textures practiced earlier, and
any other coloring desired.
Final drawing make up a scene on a full sheet. Use
reference photos if you want.