With some of my 7Palettes friends, I’m studying plein air painting with Carol Rubin this Spring.  Last week, it was too chilly to paint outdoors, so we made line drawings of a complex still life Carol had assembled.  Here’s a ‘line drawing’ made of oil paints.  Our warmup exercises follow.

hat, vases & vegetation. oil on canvas.

Two 30 second drawings.

bottle, pot & dried hydrangea. charcoal pencil on vellum.

hat and more. charcoal pencil on vellum.

A minute-long ‘continuous line’ drawing — made without taking the pencil off of the paper.

hat, pots & plants. charcoal pencil on vellum.

A ‘blind contour’ — made while keeping eyes on the object.  NO looking at the paper!  (Well, maybe we got to take three short peeks. . . .)

no looking at the scribblings??  only the objects???  charcoal on vellum.

And finally, as depicted above, we made complex line drawings in black paint and then brushed thick white paint over selected areas to ‘erase’ lines as needed to make the ‘drawing’ more accurate or more interesting.  A fun day.  I did more at home using my own props.  Will post those next time.