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Lesson one is line drawing.

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The line is really the beginning of drawing.

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Well, in fact it starts with a dot but that dot very quickly turns into a line.

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Now the most common use of the line in drawing is to create something we call

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an outline.

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In the case of this drawing, it's the outline of a leaf.

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There are these inner lines drawn on, but we're gonna ignore those for

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the time being.

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The outline is what enables us to say the word leaf.

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The reason Ruskin starts with a leaf in historian course

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is that it is already flat.

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It's not a process of taking something that's three-dimensional and flattening

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it, but it's taking something that's flat and simply drawing its outline.

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But instead of tracing around it, what Ruskin asks us to to do is to copy it,

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to follow exactly where the line of the leaf is

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on a piece of paper using the tip of a pencil.

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And it may not sound like a very difficult thing, but

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it is a very difficult thing to get it to look accurate at the end.

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And the way that Ruskin asked his students to check the accuracy

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was to trace the original leaf and then use it as a check on their own drawing.

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Lifting up the tracing, drawing on, closing it down again and

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seeing whether they will get the line in the right place.

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Now, what's interesting about this drawing is that it looks very precise.

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It looks although Ruskin got it right the first time and was brilliant at drawing.

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This, in fact, isn't the case.

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It's full of corrections, all the way around the edge of this drawing Ruskin is

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using an eraser to check the accuracy of the line,

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to remove bits to the wrong, and come back in with a pencil and correct them.

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And so, in fact, this is a very heavily work page.

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And that is important in terms of this lesson.

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Because one of the most important things in learning to draw is

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understanding lines you put down can be changed, can be improved,

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and this can be done by having an eraser.

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And of course, that really is the most important aspect of modern drawing.

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We have paper, which is nice and clean and white.

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We have a pencil which you can make marks on it with and

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we have an eraser with which you can remove them, and that is process

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that you need to get involved in if you're gonna improve your drawing.

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So making marks, correcting them, remaking marks, it's a modeling process.

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This Is a tracing of the edge of a leaf drawn from life.

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A real leaf was placed on a table sheet of tracing paper paste over it, and

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went around the edge with a pencil.

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Now, this is gonna be what I use to test the accuracy of my own drawing.

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But before I put it to one side, I'm gonna use it to make some marks on

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the paper that I'm gonna draw on, some guiding marks.

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So slide the pencil underneath and I can mark the top, I can mark there,

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I can mark there and just get a few pointers.

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So it makes life easy for me when it comes to locating

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the points of the leaf and also getting it the right size.

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So here you can see my marks.

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Now looking at the leaf, start with the easy part the stem,

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and then quite likely work my way around the edge.

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Effectively joining up some of the points, but

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also looking at where the leaf really does turn and twist on this edge.

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Now the idea of this exercise is rather like an athlete going into training,

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it's not to produce the beautiful drawing.

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It's not to do anything other than get you used to using a pencil, looking

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at an object, and making a line that approximates to the edges of that object.

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Now, if I place my drawing underneath the tracing,

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I can look through and I can see that it's not bad.

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I need to do some work in this area.

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I've cut in too much there.

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I've gone out too much there, stems are bit bent but nothing worrying.

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Now I'm gonna go back and make these corrections.

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Then I'm gonna darken the line.

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And I think probably before I do anything,

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I'm going to erase the area that I'm least satisfied with.

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Now when you erase, you can usually see roughly where you've worked before.

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And so it's not as difficult as the first time.

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It's not a question of reinventing it.

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It's just a matter of improving it, there we are.

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Now having done that, and hopefully, well, actually,

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there was a bit of a problem down here.

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I think that's too wide.

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I'm going to correct that.

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Then I'm very quickly going to darken up my edge

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and hopefully end up with an image

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that isn't precisely the same as what it is the edge of the leaf that I picked.

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That actually is pretty close to it.

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Now, if I lay my drawing back over.

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Here we'll see, I can see that there are some errors,

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but they're not very substantial errors.

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And what I've drawn is something that approximates to the actual leaf.