In this one-on-one tutoring class, Alice and I will continue her exploration of adding a sense of dimension and light to her drawings of people. We will work mostly in Procreate on the iPad as we have been doing, though we may experiment with some pencil or colored pencil on paper, too. In our first two sessions, Alice showed me some drawings she worked on recently, and we talked through some ways to use Procreate tools to improve workflow, clarity, and sense of depth. 

In week 1, I introduced a 10-step value scale from white to black, and we practiced using clipping masks, blending brushes, and multiply layers to add shadow and highlight to a sphere shape. Then we transposed those skills onto the round shape of a head. 

In week 2, we talked about some basic ways to add shadow and highlight to geometric volumes. Using our 1-10 value scale from the first week, we practiced blending gradients of shadow on a sphere, cone, cylinder, and cube, again using clipping masks. Looking at Alice's recent drawings of silent movie starlets, we talked about breaking down the elements of the face into a series of blended geometric volumes. (a nose can be some spheres in a cone, the lips can be two tapered cylinders, etc.) 

This new classroom will cover sessions 3-5. This is my rough outline for those classes, though I plan to adapt each class to Alice's questions and explorations from the previous week, so this plan may change. 

In session 3, I plan to introduce Alice to the idea of structuring a figure drawing as if it was a robot made of cylinders and spheres, exaggerating the roundness and angles of connection of the body parts. I'll introduce a 7-head scale for proportion. As we build the form, I'll encourage us to 'draw through' the shape to show connections and intersections. We'll draw as if the robot body is chrome shiny, and we'll look at some reference for lighting, and play with gaussian and perspective blurs and other effects. 

In session 4, we'll look at the figure another way, as a series of irregular forms covered by a smooth wrapping (aka, bag of vegetables). We'll practice drawing the less structured organic forms of wrinkles, lumps, and smooth transitions between volumes. We'll discuss the difference between form and line, silhouette and detail. 

In session 5, we'll find a way to put the previous two lessons together. We'll structure a new full-body character pose using robot cylinder volumes, and then add softness and overlap with organic forms. 

We can always add more sessions to this class, and I'd love to introduce things like facial expressions, gesture drawing, composition, color theory, etc when the time is right.