How I teach digital drawing landscapes (Part 1)

  Landscapes are a huge lesson, and you can literally spend your entire career as an artist focusing on landscapes, in fact, there are entire art periods just focused on Landscapes... So how do you teach a group of new artists to draw a giant art style while also learning how to use digital drawing for the first time?

Well, I don't have the perfect answer but after teaching this class for 6 years, I have finally found a formula that has garnered the most successful results. 

We start with a mini-lesson. Here is the video of the tutorial. This minimalist landscape project is nice for two reasons: it gets kids to think in terms of aerial and 1-point perspective, while also completing an "easy win" project. If the student follows those directions, the project looks great. And that gives them a confidence boost to want to take on the next steps. 

This video is for pixlr which is a browser-based program so your students can even do this on a Chromebook.

Here are a few examples of student work.

Low Poly digital Mosaic project

Every year my lessons change drastically. I actually have joked that in my 8 years of teaching, I have never taught that same intro project to my second semester twice. But that is not the case for the Low poly project. 

This project is my own spin on a popular design trend. I treat my lesson more like a digital mosaic, so students can choose their own shapes and styles with their designs. 

This is some of the featured work from this year. 

Long exposure

 I love this lesson. But every year I have a very different response to it. Some really love it, but the work they do falls short, some hate it and their work struggles, and some just click with it. And this year was a click year. The kids nailed the assignment they challenged themselves took risks and made some amazing projects. 

Thing I that have worked: 

- good prompts 

- using the pixel stick to illustrate how long exposure works

- Encouraging cameras to go home

- I love this video made by a YouTube a few years ago, it's short and to the point and shows a variety of photos that actually seem possible for the students A lot of long exposure feels impossible, and that makes them shut down. 

Things that don't work:

- too much instructions(they get bored and feel like they need to be too specific)

- forgetting to have examples of camera settings written out and posted, so if they do not know what to do they can just look it up)

So enjoy the examples of student work!