Levels 7 - 8

Level 7
By the time this level is completed, you will be doing free-hand line drawing as skillfully and easily as you had been doing grid drawing on Level 6. The Level 7 pen and ink projects include higher level brush techniques and more advanced methods of formal hatching. You will also begin a series of informal hatching ink projects (drawings that involve very rapid pen strokes), and learn to use an "artist's pen", a drawing tool with interchangeable points that are dipped into a bottle of ink. You will be introduced to the medium of "scratch board" where drawings are done by scratching away a black coating to expose the white of the paper underneath. You will do a charcoal shading project in which regular line drawings are "modeled" or rounded-off to look 3-dimensional and will complete the free-hand line drawing series from pictures. You will undertake the challenge of free-hand line drawing from life by drawing pictures of simple cubical forms like blocks, boxes, books, etc., and cylindrical forms like cups and bottles. In addition, you will paint water color pictures from a color original, a process that involves precise color matching and the use of transparent washes. You will also take perspective drawing a step further with the original design of a building interior


Level 8

On Level 8 you will complete your mastery of black and white pencil shading from artists’ originals and duplicating pictures from pen and ink originals, including portraits and landscapes.  You will then move on to photographic subjects in pencil, pen and ink and charcoal and will duplicate them as precisely as the media allow.  Your final black & white pencil shading project will be the duplication of a high-resolution photograph in pencil -- one of the major milestones in the program and a preliminary requirement for oil painting. Your mastery of the high resolution photograph will be followed by the rendering of a black and white oil painting from a photograph in the process of which you will be introduced to the glazing, dry-brush, and wet-into-wet oil painting techniques.

Other ink projects include quick sketches from photographs and from life and the use of more intricate techniques with the brush. More time will be spent on design concepts on this level where you will be responsible for the reading and understanding of a short text summarizing the basic principles of design and will employ those principles in at least one project employing both copied and inventive elements. (The purpose of this project is to gain experience in the type of process used in the graphic design field). You will also begin a series of full-value still-life drawings in charcoal, conte pencil and pen and ink.