I found an excellent book for absolute beginners called Drawing with Children (A Creative Method for Adult Beginners, Too) by Mona Brookes. It’s been around for a while, so I can’t believe I hadn’t found it until now. I would like to share a little about it and my perspective on her method (so this may be more of an introduction to her book rather than a tutorial). In my previous tutorial I mention basic shapes and a little about technique. Here, Mona breaks it down even further to the basic elements of shape. And since we are beginners here, we are not so concerned with technique but rather learning to translate what we see and putting it on paper.
Here is Mona’s 5 Basic Elements of Shape:

Notice that all are abstract. Everyone draws these shapes everyday writing letters and symbols, and they are also found in everything we can see. Since you probably already know how to reproduce these, it is just a matter of using them as building blocks and turning them into something representational.
For example:

Oh my goodness! A bird!


To put this into practice: copy, copy, copy from other artists, especially those that inspire you. (Greeting cards are an excellent source of various styles if you save them like I do!) This is how you learn, just like when you had to copy the alphabet over and over again in grade school until you got it right. Don’t always expect it to be an exact copy because everyone sees things differently. Again, like the alphabet, everyone’s handwriting is different and like everything else it will take practice. However many hours you put into it, is what you will get out of it. Also, Mona encourages using markers in the beginning, so you aren’t tempted to erase. This will help build confidence and encourage creative problem solving if you feel like you “messed up”. And of course you don’t have to like everything you do. Many times professional artists only like 1 or 2 out of every 5 pieces of their own art.


Here are some exercises taken from Mona’s book for you to practice on:

And finally, here are a couple of examples from Picasso and Van Gogh for you to copy from. You can easily identify (and reproduce) all the basic elements!

If this has helped you, I encourage you to check out Mona Brookes’ book!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.