LESSON PLANS SPRING TERM 2024 (1st half) Lesson 1: Tiny Still Life - Charcoal and eraser.

We start our spring term early in the new year. This lesson is all about negotiations with charcoal and eraser. I shall ask my students to lay out a still life of tiny objects on a piece of dark paper and begin their drawings by rubbing out!

Spring Term 1st half 2024 – Lesson 1. Tiny still life, charcoal & eraser.

·         Set out your objects with some spaces between them on the piece pf dark paper (which I have provided).

·         Using a piece of soft charcoal on its side, darken your whole sheet of paper and then smudge the charcoal to a middling tone (use a bit of cloth, rag, kitchen roll or loo roll for the smudging).

·         Using your eraser, gently rub out the lighter places – do not look for detail at this point.

·         If you don’t have a tiny eraser, borrow my Stanley knife, and cut a piece off your big eraser.

·         Now you can begin to look for more detail – once you know where the details might go, having already rubbed out the more general light places.

·         You can now work back in with charcoal to further work on the detail.

·         From here on in, it’s a negotiation between putting in and rubbing out your charcoal to bring your drawing gradually into focus.

Next lesson: Using watercolour, working on a painting of the whole or a part-section of your drawing. Bring your still-life objects, drawings and watercolours with you. Bring good watercolour paper.