Lesson one is line drawing.
The line is really the beginning of drawing.
Well, in fact it starts with a dot but that dot very quickly turns into a line.
Now the most common use of the line in drawing is to create something we call
an outline.
In the case of this drawing, it's the outline of a leaf.
There are these inner lines drawn on, but we're gonna ignore those for
the time being.
The outline is what enables us to say the word leaf.
The reason Ruskin starts with a leaf in historian course
is that it is already flat.
It's not a process of taking something that's three-dimensional and flattening
it, but it's taking something that's flat and simply drawing its outline.
But instead of tracing around it, what Ruskin asks us to to do is to copy it,
to follow exactly where the line of the leaf is
on a piece of paper using the tip of a pencil.
And it may not sound like a very difficult thing, but
it is a very difficult thing to get it to look accurate at the end.
And the way that Ruskin asked his students to check the accuracy
was to trace the original leaf and then use it as a check on their own drawing.
Lifting up the tracing, drawing on, closing it down again and
seeing whether they will get the line in the right place.
Now, what's interesting about this drawing is that it looks very precise.
It looks although Ruskin got it right the first time and was brilliant at drawing.
This, in fact, isn't the case.
It's full of corrections, all the way around the edge of this drawing Ruskin is
using an eraser to check the accuracy of the line,
to remove bits to the wrong, and come back in with a pencil and correct them.
And so, in fact, this is a very heavily work page.
And that is important in terms of this lesson.
Because one of the most important things in learning to draw is
understanding lines you put down can be changed, can be improved,
and this can be done by having an eraser.
And of course, that really is the most important aspect of modern drawing.
We have paper, which is nice and clean and white.
We have a pencil which you can make marks on it with and
we have an eraser with which you can remove them, and that is process
that you need to get involved in if you're gonna improve your drawing.
So making marks, correcting them, remaking marks, it's a modeling process.
This Is a tracing of the edge of a leaf drawn from life.
A real leaf was placed on a table sheet of tracing paper paste over it, and
went around the edge with a pencil.
Now, this is gonna be what I use to test the accuracy of my own drawing.
But before I put it to one side, I'm gonna use it to make some marks on
the paper that I'm gonna draw on, some guiding marks.
So slide the pencil underneath and I can mark the top, I can mark there,
I can mark there and just get a few pointers.
So it makes life easy for me when it comes to locating
the points of the leaf and also getting it the right size.
So here you can see my marks.
Now looking at the leaf, start with the easy part the stem,
and then quite likely work my way around the edge.
Effectively joining up some of the points, but
also looking at where the leaf really does turn and twist on this edge.
Now the idea of this exercise is rather like an athlete going into training,
it's not to produce the beautiful drawing.
It's not to do anything other than get you used to using a pencil, looking
at an object, and making a line that approximates to the edges of that object.
Now, if I place my drawing underneath the tracing,
I can look through and I can see that it's not bad.
I need to do some work in this area.
I've cut in too much there.
I've gone out too much there, stems are bit bent but nothing worrying.
Now I'm gonna go back and make these corrections.
Then I'm gonna darken the line.
And I think probably before I do anything,
I'm going to erase the area that I'm least satisfied with.
Now when you erase, you can usually see roughly where you've worked before.
And so it's not as difficult as the first time.
It's not a question of reinventing it.
It's just a matter of improving it, there we are.
Now having done that, and hopefully, well, actually,
there was a bit of a problem down here.
I think that's too wide.
I'm going to correct that.
Then I'm very quickly going to darken up my edge
and hopefully end up with an image
that isn't precisely the same as what it is the edge of the leaf that I picked.
That actually is pretty close to it.
Now, if I lay my drawing back over.
Here we'll see, I can see that there are some errors,
but they're not very substantial errors.
And what I've drawn is something that approximates to the actual leaf.