Camp Focus: What is Drawing Camp?

​This week in our Camp Focuses series, we’re taking a close look at one of our all-time most popular summer camps: Drawing Camp.

If you have questions about one of our other camps, you can find so many helpful answers on our earlier blogs on Painting Camp, Sculpture Camp, and Mixed Media Camp. (and stay tuned for our next blog coming soon: Pottery Camp!)

But now back to Drawing Camp. We have a couple guesses on why this camp is one of our most popular:

1. Drawing is a helpful skill which encompasses many of the basic techniques that are utilized in many other forms of art, in other words, it’s a great foundational discipline to start with.
2. Parents and children both know what they can expect from a drawing camp, simply put, their child will be learning to draw cool things.

But there is SO MUCH MORE than just “learning to draw cool things” going on, so let’s dive a little deeper into what exactly your child will really be learning at our Drawing Camps this summer, so you truly can know what to expect.

still life in oil pastel

​​At our summer Drawing Camps, we do our best to give a broad overview of vital drawing elements: we use a wide range of drawing media, such as graphite, colored pencils, inking, charcoal, and pastels to explore fundamental aspects of drawing, such as utilizing perspective, applying value, and observational drawing.
 
Sometimes our camp projects focus on one specific fundamental aspect, such as creating a value study, or a study on perspective, and sometimes we practice these techniques together in one work.

​For example, to create a still life, our campers would utilize all three of these techniques and learn how they work together to create a realistic-looking work of art.

​But let’s break each of them down a bit.

Perspective
​
Perspective is the way of representing drawn items on a 2-D plane (like a piece of paper) how they appear to the eye in real life. For instance, how telephone poles get smaller to our eyes the farther away they are – that’s perspective.

Perspective is an obvious element in landscape drawings (you’ve probably done one before with a road or railroad tracks, making them disappear in a small point on the horizon), but is still applicable to any other object you hope to make look realistic from humans to animals to flowers in vases.

With any new object we draw, campers get a chance to practice perspective that may challenge them in a new way each time, since they will never be drawing or re-creating an exact work they’ve done before. Even though it’s the same technique, it’s a skill that always needs refining with each new object.

Campers with their perspective study: bird's eye view of skyscrapers

Value
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Value is another way of learning to accurately represent items from real life on a flat surface, but in a different way than perspective.

Value, summed up, is light and dark and everything in between (think shades of gray if we’re using graphite to shade. We explain a little values in colors a little more in depth in our “What is Painting Camp?” blog).

Light and dark values added to a drawing create a sense of depth – like the shading on an apple or a ball or a human hand is what give that apple and ball and human hand real form.

5-8 year-old campers learning about value and light source

​Observational Drawing
​
One of the most important techniques we work with our campers on is observational drawing. Observational drawing is when an artist observes the world around them, and then translates their findings onto a two-dimensional surface (such as a sheet of paper).

To do this, artists measure the size and shape of their subject matter, break each object down into basic geometric shapes, and use proportions to accurately draw their subject.

In many instances, our campers find that using measuring, and breaking down their subject, makes their final project look more realistic.

With this project, campers first learned about turning a photo into basic shapes by tracing the shapes over the photo, then recreated the shapes on another piece of paper before filling in the details

​​Our campers also learn how to use their observational drawing skills and to apply them to a more stylized drawing project, as opposed to a realistic one. One of our most popular drawing projects from last year’s camps was our inked animal project.
 
For this project, campers learned how to break down an animal’s form into simple geometric shapes and use those shapes to carefully draw the animal’s form on their paper. 

​Campers then check proportions, adjust their shapes, and finally add details to their animals. They took their drawings a step further by inking them with pens, and even adding hatching and cross-hatching in some areas.

For our fun final step, students had the chance to experiment with loose ink, and added color to their animals with a variety of inking techniques, from using a brush to adding some splatters.


Do you have any other questions about what goes on or what your child will be learning in our Drawing Camps? Send us an email at [email protected] or give us a call at 425-391-0244, we'd love to hear from you and we'd love to fill you in on any other details. In the meantime, check out all of our summer art camps and save your child's spot before they're full.