Thursday, April 19, 2007

Bristol Festival of Nature workshop

The Bristol Festival of Nature happens every year and for the past two I have held small drawing workshops as part of the activities. I have again been booked for this year (2nd and 3rd June) and I shall be holding two workshops on each day to show/teach people how to start off a drawing with a very simple technique.
Many people who don't draw but would like to, when they talk to me about drawing, say they wouldn't know where/how to start. There are many ways to approach a drawing and the technique I show on these workshops is one of using basic geometric shapes. I find it helps take away the 'fears' of an empty sheet of paper and gets people started quickly and easily once they have an idea of what to do. It's all about confidence... there aren't many people (old and young) who don't know how to draw the shapes of circles and squares, but how many know the shape, for example, of a lemur. This is the daunting aspect and puts many off. So instead of trying to draw the lemur shape straight away we draw circles, ovals, squares, triangles first... whatever fits best. And before you know it you've drawn a lemur!
I love seeing the look of achievement on someone's face at the end of a workshop; so different to the look of fear or dismay when I tell them what we are drawing at the start of the workshop.

For a step by step demo on how to draw a lemur, look in my blog archive (down the right hand side of the page), under June's entries you'll see 'How to draw a lemur'.

Click here if you want to know more about the Festival.

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