Pencil sketch of a village by a student

While I am not downplaying the talent of the student artist in question, people tend to think that landscapes and particularly building with straight edges, are some of the more easy things to replicate with drawing. When using pencils, which is something I highly recommend, we are able to fix any mistakes that we make as well. We can't all be Bob Ross after all :)

This was done using one of the grid apps that I recommend people use when they are starting out because it makes it a lot easier for people to be satisfied with their results and i think this is so important for people when they are just starting out. You can see if you look closely that the student has lightly marked 1 inch squared on their paper so that they can work on replicating one small part of the picture at a time.

Even when using this method I encourage people to still start at the bottom and work their way up or even better, to focus on on particular element of the scene all at once and just use the grids for the hard things like getting the scale on a human or animal in the picture correct. The idea here isn't to just be a trained monkey that is copying something square for square because if that is all you are going to do you may as well just make a photocopy of the picture in question or just print it out on a laser printer.

Here is the original picture for comparison's sake. I think the student did quite a good job and I congratulated her on a job well done. This was not homework. I do not assign homework and I wouldn't expect the students to do it if I did since this is a completely elective class. This is something that the student simply decided to do on her own time and that makes me happy. You can see that she made some adjustments and that to me shows that she wasn't just doing a 1-1 copy of the original.

When executed correctly, and there is no ONE correct way, this grid method can inspire people to continue into the world of artistry and I think this creative side of things is extremely important for a person's development.