I just finished teaching a six week class of beginning drawing. I have posted a selection of drawings on a page that you can reach by clicking here. Thank you to all the students who contributed their work to this post and the attached page.
Here is a description of some of the things we worked on in this class:

Andrea Ritter
We worked on blind continuous line and looking continuous line drawings. The students were asked to feel the form of what they were drawing. We did this with hands and apples and self portraits and they practiced with other objects they found around their home for homework. We discussed and practiced cross contours, not just the outlines of things we were studying.

Rose Clair
We studied negative space and drew the shapes we viewed between the legs and supports of a stool in order to find the positive shape of that stool. Drawing the shapes between the edges of the leaves of plants and slats on a chair are good for practice seeing negative space and shapes.

Andrea Ritter2

Donald Cooper4
We learned to measure shapes and to determine angles with our pencils and how to translate them onto our page. Everyone practiced this skill by drawing an interior room. We learned that objects overlap in space and get smaller when distant. We learned that objects became blurry and less clear in the distance and that all these things enhanced depth in a drawing. This helped us to get our drawings into perspective and to become more believable.

Rose Clair3
On the 4th week we began to study value. We, first, studied the different ways we could shade and make marks; side of pencil, pointillism, crosshatching, squiggles and lines rendered side by side.
We used photos of strips of eyes to practice shading in the value shapes in medium and dark tones, leaving the white of the paper for our lights.

Susie Covitt3
We also cut a colored photo into strips and studied the value changes in color by translating the shapes of values we saw into graphite.

Susie Covitt4
We practiced drawing and shading clear glass objects from life. Note how this artist used different pencil marks to indicate the contours of the bottles.

Dianna Chad3
We practiced drawing and shading a self portrait as viewed in a mirror. We all remarked about the “self portrait stares” we were getting. 🙂

Donald Cooper

Andrea Ritter3
We learned to grid a photo and transform the format of the photo and the grid onto our drawing paper.

Dianna Chad4
We used all the skills we had learned to draw a still life of a pile of boxes.
Viewers can enlarge any of the above drawings by just clicking on them.