Line and shape
Art & Design · Key Stage 1 · The School
What a line can do
A line can be fast or slow. It can be thick or thin. Straight or curved. Broken or continuous. Draw the same leaf four times. Change only the KIND of line each time. The four drawings will feel completely different. Line carries mood before it carries information.
Continuous line drawing
Put your pencil down and draw an object. A shoe. A plant. A cup. Do it without lifting the pencil once. The drawing will look odd. That is fine. It forces you to keep your eyes on the OBJECT instead of on the page. That is the single hardest habit in drawing.
Seeing versus knowing
Ask most people to draw a cup. They draw a circle on top of a rectangle. That is what they KNOW a cup is. Now look at a real cup from the side. The top is a flat oval. It is not a circle. Drawing well is mostly the discipline of believing your eyes over your memory.
Sit at the corner of a rectangular table and draw its top. What you KNOW is a rectangle with four right angles. Now look at what you SEE from where you sit. It is a four-sided shape. Two long edges run away from you and get closer together. There are no right angles at all. Close one eye. Hold a pencil up to check each edge's angle. Drawing what you see is what makes it look right.