Friday 16th April 2021
Rebecca Le Tourneau was invited to give this Zoom Drawing Workshop by Lesley Kilner, who has been taking her Adult Education Acrylics course. Rebecca is a fully qualified art teacher with 14 years’ experience of teaching both children and adults at Surrey Education Learning.
This was the first time FCSA had tried to use Zoom for an art workshop, and it was wonderful to see 29 participants which included two new members and a visitor.
Rebecca began by accepting that two hours is a relatively short period of time for a drawing workshop as some drawings can take many hours. However, she thinks scribble is an interesting method of drawing and it lends itself to being done quickly. Rebecca had sent out examples of her scribble drawings and reference photos to the participants prior to Friday evening.
Rebecca provided some prompt words that might help to encourage people to try all sorts of different marks and scribbles using biro, liners or even marker pens to provide colour. The prompt words: Dense/Sparse; Dark/Light; Thick/Thin, Tiny/Large; Erratic/Controlled; Over & Over; Layered; Scrawled; Loopy; Scattered; Interrupted; Jagged.
Rebecca then began drawing a little dog over the top of some of her of scribble marks while she encouraged us to have a go at producing a scribble drawing using either the reference material or our own images.
There are some fun things to do with a series of scribble drawings, such as creating a collage of them as seen here.
Another idea is to make a little book of scribble drawings such as this. Follow this link to see how to create one of these books from an A4 sheet of paper.
Rebecca has created a Pinterest board as Pinterest lends itself well to collecting ideas and examples. As can be seen on the board are a number of famous artists who have used this technique including CY Twombly, Sally Muir and Susan Siegel, Alberto Giacometti and Adam Riches. Henry Moore used it to draw these scribble hands.
One advantage of a Zoom workshop was that Rebecca was able to show everyone a video of Adam Riches on YouTube. Adam Riches is a young artist who uses pen and ink to create striking portraits.
Inspired by what we had been shown everyone was encouraged to have another go. Rebecca would be demonstrating at the same time. She was going to use the reference photo of the lemur and she suggested that this might make a good choice of picture for this technique.
Towards the end of the evening Rebecca showed us the drawing she had made of the little blue bird from her photo reference material. She had done this on a piece of tracing paper and she pointed out that she had then cross hatched the background on the back of the tracing paper, which produced a different look and texture to that of the bird.
A number of the participants took up Rebecca’s recommendation and when she asked how people were doing, they were happy to hold up their work for people to see. These are just a few of the screen grabs that were taken from the screen.
At the end of the workshop a number of people expressed their thanks and appreciation for a really fascinating and inspiring workshop. Of course, everyone looks forward to the time when we will be able to meet together again but during these Coronavirus days the Zoom Workshop worked well. Thank you to Rebecca for a very enjoyable evening.
Write up by Carole Head