Drawings from the Naturkundemuseum: Drawing Workshop

As part of the Drawing Workshop, we always take a field trip to Berlin's wonderful Natural History Museum. The drawings always turn out great, and I wanted to share some of them here, along with some of the assignments they pertain to. The class is organized like a drawing scavenger hunt, with various drawing tasks to be completed and specimens to be discovered - or on some cases, invented!

Enjoy!

5 minute blind contour drawing of dinosaur skeleton

invent a new species: combine part of one animal with another

negative space drawing of bones

Charles Darwin + Dodo bird

Tonality Drawings: Student Work

Each class in the Drawing Workshop focuses on a different formal topic. The focus of the third class was tonality, or shading. To make a tonality drawing, one cannot leave any visible outlines, or contour lines. This technique requires a lot of patience, as one must slowly build up layers of graphite to blend the tones and achieve enough contrast. My students did a great job on this assignment! Check out their work! 

Some other artists we looked to for inspiration on this technique are: Georges Seurat and David Musgrave. Just click on their name to see some of the examples of their work that we looked at during class.