" DANNY McLAUGHLIN DEMONSTRATING THE ART OF DRAWING" 5 '10

May 2 the Sea Coast Artist build held its regularly scheduled monthly meeting. The agenda featured a short business meeting (to elect officers) followed by an interesting program:

" DANNY McLAUGHLIN DEMONSTRATING THE ART OF DRAWING"

Danny is a well-known artist who loves to capture live scenes of people in his paintings. In his demonstration, he used photos chosen at random from a People Magazine, a white board, and dry erase pens to show us how he practices quickly capturing the essence of a scene with people in it.

Danny focuses upon shapes and angles when he is drawing rather than objects. First he blocks off a rough shape ( like a triangle) in which the characters will fit within the larger rectangle of the painting's shape.

Then he chooses a two points on one of the figures and draws the line of the angle between them ( e.g. a thumb and an elbow, or the side of the face to a shoulder). He continues drawing shapes and connecting angles with lines until the entire shape of the object he is drawing emerges clearly.

He repeated this demonstration with three different photos from People Magazine.

Then he had several of the members of the audience come up and try it... Believe me it is harder than it looks.

For me, the most valuable idea  I took away from the lesson was the idea of using a white board to practice improving one's drawing skills.  I draw fairly well .  I do however  get frustrated with practicing in a paper sketchbook.  I find find that if I draw one angle wrong, it is hard to fully  remove or correct on paper. and the smudged correction always tends to distract me. With a white board... just erase that bad angle with your finger. Makes practicing much simpler and faster.