Line and shape
Art & Design · Key Stage 1 · The School
What a line can do
A line can be fast or slow, thick or thin, straight or curved, broken or continuous. Draw the same leaf four times, changing only the KIND of line, and 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 — without lifting it once. The drawing will look odd, and that is fine. It forces you to keep your eyes on the OBJECT instead of on the page, which is the single hardest habit in drawing.
Seeing versus knowing
Ask most people to draw a cup and they draw a circle on top of a rectangle, because that is what they KNOW a cup is. Look at a real cup from the side: the top is a flat oval, 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. What you SEE, from where you are sitting, is a four-sided shape with two long edges converging away from you and no right angles at all. Close one eye and hold a pencil up to check each edge's angle. Drawing what you see is what makes it look right.