Welcome back to my amazing blog! If you love drawing as much as I do, I’m sure you’ll find this post very interesting and fun. If not, I’d recommend to check it out anyways, because it might paint up some inspiration.  Without further a do, lets get going.

This unit was called constructing creative communication. The class was divided into two groups- Herzog 📸 ( photography ) and Carr ✏️ ( drawing ). I was in Carr : Power of a pencil. This was not exactly a project, it was more of a building skills unit. I really enjoyed it, mostly because we did a lot of drawing and we also had a guest speaker, who works as a graphic designer. Cool right?

So to start of this unit, we learned a little bit about about Emily Carr. Emily Carr was born in British Columbia in 1871. She was a Canadian artist who was inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. She made beautiful paintings and sketches of  Aboriginal themes to forest landscapes. Carr died in March of 1945, but still inspires people with her artwork. See below for some of her art:

After learning a bit about her, we picked up our apple pencils and started drawing. We used an app called Sketches Pro, because not all of us had 13.99 $ to buy Procreate on our iPads. The first thing we needed to do before making any drawings was to check out the Sketches pro tool bar. I found it fun exploring the different tools and brush sizes. The lines you made all depended on how much pressure you used and what tool you used.

My favourite tools were: 

• the watercolour brushes: It was like making an actual watercolour painting without making a mess! I loved the fact that you could blend the colours together when your water colour was still wet and that your painting looked textured when you pressed the “ dry ” button.
• The ink brush: the slanted brush made it perfect for hand lettering and calligraphy
• The fill tool: This tool was super fun to use to fill in drawings and add colourful patterns.

Our first piece of homework was to write our names in block lettering. I shortened my name to “Gwen”, because I had tried to do my full name, but the letters turned out super small and squished together.  I experimented with some styles but this was my final one:

We did a gallery walk in class so that everyone could see each other’s word art. The second skill we practiced in class was doodling. My two favourite pieces of work for this skill were my expressing emotion with an emoji, and also, one of my sketch notes. Creating the emoji was the easier part, picking which emoji to draw was the harder part, for me. There are so many emojis and you can feel a lot of emotions at once. I finally chose this one, where its making a silly face : 🤪. Here is my silly face emoji that I made on Sketches Pro.

As you can see, I tried to recreate Apple’s zany face emoji by including a light source and shadows like if you see the emoji up close.  The other thing I wanted to show you was my sketch note. We practiced sketch noting in class and then to reflect on the skill, I created a sketch note for the Sunni Brown TED Talk. Now if you haven’t seen this video, I would recommend you see it because it is super interesting; and its all about the greatness of doodling. Before trying to do a sketch note for the first time, we all practiced doodling some fonts, containers and connectors to include in our sketch notes. This is my sketch note:

Ok, so I’m not supposed to include everything in this post although I’m really proud of lots of my artwork. I’m going to include one more drawing that I’m proud of and one that I think I could improve on. 

The next skill we practiced in class was shading and lighting. Artists use light and shadow in their art to make their work more logical, realistic and to make things look 3 dimensional. In class, we took a photo of a mug that the teacher gave us. Then we tried to visually break it down into shapes, so that it would be easier to draw. I applied more pressure on the pencil when colouring in shadowed parts, and less pressure where the light was hitting the mug. This was not an easy task. Some of my classmates did it super well, shoutout to Sofia, I thought hers was really good. Our task as homework was to draw an object at home using the lighting skills we had practiced in class. I drew my water bottle:

Now the last skill I would like to touch on is using perspective. We used our artist eyes to draw landscapes trying to use linear perspective. Learn more about linear perspective here. As homework, we were supposed to draw our favourite landscape, keeping in mind linear perspective. For this task, we were allowed to use “layers”, a feature on Sketches pro where you can trace on top of a photo and then delete the photo, so that it looks like your drawing. For an artist this would be cheating, but I like to make my art look nice and I was finding it frustrating to draw whichever photo I chose. I decided to try and draw a photo of my dog and the sunset, using layers. Using layers was frustrating because sometimes I would be drawing on the wrong layer and I’d been working on it for a long time. Then you’d have to erase and restart on the right layer 😩. Next time, I’m drawing a landscape, I shouldn’t use layers or I should check every 5 minutes that Im drawing on the right layer. Anyway… this is the photo I was trying to draw and then my drawing of it.

One more super cool thing: We got to zoom with Chloe Devine, who works as a graphic designer and illustrator. I thought that it was super cool to get to zoom with her. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and does all of her art on her iPad with her Apple Pencil, just like us. I got to go up and ask her a question at the camera. This was my question: “ What apps and platforms do you use to create your artwork?’’. She pays monthly fees for premium Adobe and Procreate to make her artwork. Her job would be so fun and she probably makes “triple Ms. Maxwell’s salary”. 😆 

Let me answer our driving question:

“How might I use technology to create and communicate? ”

Well no matter what job you decide to pursue in life, it is most likely to involve critical and creative thinking and some communication. Some people might have jobs that directly relate to drawing but others not. We build these skills and techniques, to develop those competencies. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been able to see some of my growth in those skills. For example, I’ve learned how to draw using Sketches Pro to construct creative and unique communication. Drawing is a great way of expressing emotion, thoughts or perspective in an appealing way. To make a drawing yours, you can personalize it with different lines, colours, shapes and discovering your unique artist way or style. My drawings were not exactly like one my classmates drawings because we each have our own ideas and inspiration, and so would you! 

Overall, I loved doing this mini-unit on the Power of a Pencil. I hope you enjoyed reading this post!