Drawing Primary Class Clips

I quite fancied drawing the view from my bedroom window.

If I'd drawn it before the 16th century,

it would have looked like this picture here,

very, very flat. This is the Bayeux Tapestry.

and it's not very 3D at all,

but in the 16th century, they discovered how to do perspective.

This was during the Renaissance, as it became known.

You can see the picture stands out.

It's a lot more 3D

and all of the lines seem to be disappearing

to one point in the distance which is known as the vanishing point,

which is the key to doing perspective.

So going back to the view from my window,

I've drawn the house in the foreground,

cos that's the biggest thing in my picture.

The other thing about perspective is that things get smaller

the further away they get.

I found my horizon line

which you can see is just a little way down

and drew that line on to my picture here

and then I did the corners. I followed along with my ruler,

drawing them into the distance to the horizon line.

Eventually, you'll notice they all meet up

at the same point on the horizon line which is here -

my vanishing point.

Now I need to carry on everything.

Let's get the second house in. Let's get the window.

That would go like that, there to there.

Down like that.

And if you just keep moving your ruler along,

all of those points,

following those lines, you can't really go too far wrong.

You keep that going all the way along

until you got to some point in the future

like this, which I've now done in pen.

You'll notice, in my original picture, there are trees

so I've left some gaps

cos there's a big tree that goes along there like that.

There's a tree back here that needs to go into my picture.

What else have we got? We've got one popping out over here.

At the front, there's a bit of tree action going on there.

Next is to paint all of that. I've started painting mine

and I'm just going to add the detail.

I think we'll do some dark green and just sort of dapple

in here like that. Get some nice detail on the go.

Paint all of this tree a nice dark colour.

So now all I'm doing is adding the shading and final touches

to the perspective.

There we go.

Nice messy green.

That bit goes in there.

Just get a bit dappling under there.

Nice white dappling over here, I think.

And you can see,

I've achieved the perfect view for my window. It needs a frame.

And there you have it.

The view from my window with perfect perspective.

-My name is Eleanor.

-I'm Eleni.

My dad's a well-known artist.

He does cartoony drawings and animations.

This term, he will be helping us with our school animation project.

Dad, how do you make the animations?

I'll show you one here. Look, on the screen.

This is someone called Sarah.

I asked her to dance for me and I filmed her

and I drew over each frame in the film.

The film is made up of 24 little photos per second.

This is the most recent film I made.

I filmed a guy called Bruce who's a dancer.

He came here and I asked him to go on my walking machine.

That's all my drawings put together.

One on top of the other.

You can see the net version of it is quite a complicated little mess.

These are the numbers of all my different frames.

I've drawn 48 frames.

That's number 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and so on.

You can see the movement through there.

Is this exactly what we'll be doing for our project.

Technically, it will be very similar.

The only difference is that I do all my drawing on the computer,

your class will use black felt-tipped pens.

We've been split into different groups.

Some of us are directors, some of us are the people who move

and some are the camera people.

# Girls on film

# Girls on film... #

Remember you have to start and end on the same movement.

# Girls on film... #

We've just finished recording it.

It went quite well, but now we have to draw it.

I hope it works.

My dad printed off 43 pictures for us

and for the rest of the five groups.

We have to get the photocopy

and line it up and get a clean sheet of plastic

and slide it in there to trace over.

We're doing the lines quite simple so it's not too hard to draw.

So I've scanned in all your drawings. They were excellent.

This one is Erica.

We've put them into a scanner

and you can see that each drawing is slightly different.

If I run them,

you can see the movement

and you can see the little numbers flickering in the corner.

-Can we see ours?

-Before everybody else?

-And cheat.

Oh, OK.

I'll give you a preview. It's a file called Eleanor.

-There you go.

-Cool.

-Do you like it?

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

It looks really funny.

You can see that it's not as smooth as the film that I did,

but that's because it's done by hand,

so you can see each drawing shaking around,

but I think that adds something.

I've saved the films on to a disc. You can take that to school

and see what the others think.

BOTH: Thanks.

ALL: Wow!

It looks like it's shining.

And the hair changes shape.

It's better than I thought it would be.

-The ear's really funny.

-Yeah. It pops out every once in a while.

-I like the way it flips back and forward.

-It's really funny.

Look at the hand.

I though it would be jerky, like, picture-picture-picture.

I like the way the skirt goes.

It's amazing to think we did it from scratch.

I like that one, it's really nice.

I like the way this one looks so realistic.

Everyone's really pleased with their project.

Yeah. They would make great screensavers.

It's very useful as a guide

to drawing a human.

It's a skeleton, so if you draw a very basic stick man,

and then flesh it out using sausage shapes.

You've got an oval there for the stomach,

circles for shoulders

little sausages for arms.

And big sausages for legs.

OK?

There is your guide and straight away, you can see your stick man

is now becoming a fleshy sort of character.

Now, if you get a darker pen,

and go round the outside of your body,

and legs, you'll see that you've got now,

a very good - even though I say so myself - person.

Yup. OK, now we've done the stick man static,

let's give him a bit of movement, OK?

Same principle again.

This time, I've got my stick man in a slight running pose, OK?

Let's get the same technique again.

Sausages for the legs,

for the arms.

I'll just go over the head again to make it stand out a bit.

Finish off with a darker pen.

Just go round the whole thing,

just to pick it out.

And there you have stick man in a running pose.

The artist I've come to meet is Ken Done,

who, in Australia,

is celebrated as one of the best artists of the 21st century.

Ken Done's work has been described as the most original

to come out of Australia and has been featured in galleries

all over the world. We can see why.

Ken, it's lovely to meet you. Welcome to London.

-Thank you very much.

-I've been admiring your art work

and apart from the vibrant colours,

the first thing I've noticed is how often

you use the famous Australian landmarks.

You've got the Sydney Opera House, the harbour. Why do you do that?

Just around the corner from where I live, I can see the Opera House

and the harbour bridge.

You know, the Opera House is such an amazing shape

and the bridge is so important to Sydney,

I guess I've painted it lots and lots of times.

Are there any rules you have to follow when you're doing a picture?

Yes and no. There are no rules in art.

It can be whatever you want it to be.

I think it's very important that you learn to draw.

To draw something means it gives you a chance

to understand what it's like.

Well, Ken, you have definitely inspired me. I'll give it a go.

I think I need some water, some boats and a bridge perhaps.

Ken, I feel a sketch coming on. Will you show us how it's done?

That would be good fun. I've never drawn this bridge.

When you're going to draw something, you've got to have a look at it

and think about how it's constructed.

They are the two towers

and there's some nice pointy bits at the top of each.

And then there's really beautiful blue bits that hold it together.

There's not one there at the moment, but there should be a bus.

Even though the river may not be the same blue as Sydney Harbour,

it's really quite a beautiful colour.

But that's how I reckon you look at a bridge.

You've made it look too easy.

I bet the kids could do it better than this.

That sounds like a challenge to me.

Sometimes, out of the corner of your eye,

you see something that would be a good thing to do.

Wonderful little orange and red sailing boat.

The great thing about your drawing is that you've gone straight to that.

You've looked through the Tower Bridge

and found the beautiful picture in there.

It's bright and bold and you can see what's there and a bit more.

That's right. Now, the bit more is what an artist does.

Cos the bit more comes out of your head.

It's your imagination.

Most people think that bridge is just made out of stone.

and there's not much colour there

and that's exactly what we were talking about before.

You can use your imagination and make it a pink bridge.

Joe, what do you think you've learned from Ken today?

I've learned that you can use whatever colours you want

and you don't have to draw what's actually there.

Draw the main shapes and do what you want with it.

I find that it's easy now to draw whatever I like however I like.

I don't always have to draw the sky blue.

Well done, everyone. They're fantastic drawings.

It just shows you what fun art can be. They're great.

Thank you so much. This has been brilliant.

You've inspired us all.

Thanks very much. It's a great pleasure.

And hopefully, we've inspired you too.

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