September children's drawing workshop themes are "Farms and Gathering the Harvest". We will do farm animals in the next few weeks. These are my demonstration drawings from this week's workshop at Rockland Public Library. Click the titles for coloring pages.

"Haying",coloring page after Kosti Ruohomaa photo
Harvest on the Farm Coloring Page
"Squirrels fishing",coloring page after Beatrix Potter

The kids wondered HOW? were they going to draw all that hay in the photo by Kosti Ruohomaa I showed them. No, they would never be able to do it. We can't draw that! I drew the hay in simple mound shapes and finally later dashed in some strokes to indicate hay sticking out. The kids made exuberant pounding sounds on the table as they dashed in their own hay strokes. 

We'd come to the end of our time and had not gotten to squirrels. I quickly told them the story of Beatrix Potter's  The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. We chose some squirrels fishing to draw from. We never got to do any chipmunks.

Catinka's Demonstration Drawings 

Children's Art 

Click the 'Read More' link to see the children's art (unless the art is showing already.)

Posted by Catinka Knoth at 10:42 PM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 5 September 2007 4:35 PM EDT

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Here are my demonstration horse drawings for last week's "Let's Draw Together" children's drawing workshop at the Rockland Public Library. For inspiration and reference I turned to the Horses of San Marco, Venice, and sumi-e artists such as Hakuho Hirayama and Takahiko Mikami.

Click the titles for horse coloring pages of the drawings:
Horse head coloring page, after horses of San Marco, Venice
Unicorn head, coloring page
Sumi-e style horse B
Sumi-e style horse A

Click the 'Read More' link to see the kids' art, if you can't see it already.

Kids' horse drawings - I haven't solved the camera exposure problem yet. Pencil drawings are just too light for the camera. I've tried all kinds of digital doctoring with the software I have, Nikon Editor and Graphic Converter:

Posted by Catinka Knoth at 12:01 AM EDT

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We drew rabbits at this week's children's drawing workshop, Rockland Public Library. The kids and some adults drew along with me as I demonstrated. See the rabbit drawings by kids and adults. One adult asked, "Why do you always start by drawing the eye and how do you get the right proportions?". I told him sometimes I work by getting proportions down first but I'd learned this 'eye first' thing from Oriental painting. Once the eye is down you have a 'being' on the paper. It is looking back at you. There is life there. From there you can better imagine the proportions. Even if you don't get them right, you still have life in front of you. Just think of caricatures and cartoons. They are often very unnatural in their proportions but because of their definiteness we accept them as they are.

These are my demonstration drawings from the workshop. Click the links for rabbit coloring pages. (Links below the pictures are the same coloring pages of the images.) I hope you'll also try drawing them. Rabbit faces Rabbits with a carrot Rabbit sawing Rabbit wearing a dress and bow Rabbit with a push mower	Rabbit faces
Rabbits with a carrot	Rabbit sawing wood, after Garth Williams
Rabbit in a dress and bow	Rabbit mowing, after Garth Williams

Posted by Catinka Knoth at 8:03 PM EDT

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This Tuesday's children's workshop at Rockland Public Library was on drawing dogs. The kids (and some parents) did follow-along drawing with my demonstrations. These are my demonstration drawings. The links below each drawing will give you a larger view that you can print out and try your own hand at. The kids' drawings are at the links below this table. The kids put their art up on the white board for gang photos. There are repeats where some drawings were turned over to show the verso and others remained.

Dogs' eyes and faces We started with practice in drawing eyes, then did a frontal dog face and a profile view.

Dachshund after Ken Hultgren, silhouette... This simple line drawing after Ken Hultgren is amazing to see how beautifully the kids can do it. Start with the snout, then a sweep along the back to the curly tail, a front leg, a back leg, and a 'z' for the eye.  The silhouette we start by scribbling in the head, then the neck and shoulders, the body, the legs and finally the kids had their choice of tails on the left. The ball was just supposed to show the difference between using an outline to draw and just using scribbling. It turned out to also be a ball for the dog!

Mean bulldog after Ken Hultgren No one wanted to try this bulldog. They all thought it looked too hard to do. But they gave in and of course they all made good scary dogs.

after Scooby-Doo We had brainstormed a list of dog characters the kids knew. Someone happened to have a Scooby Doo book, so we gave it a try. I didn't even know who he is even though I'd heard of him. We started with nose, then the eyes. When I put in the mouth there was a roar of laughter from the kids. I said, "Whaaat?", thinking something had happened that I was unaware of. An adult filled me in, "They like it." Wait til you see their Scooby-Doo's below.

Posted by Catinka Knoth at 7:31 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 16 August 2007 8:01 PM EDT

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