Drawing for Designers: Techniques of Expression, Articulation, and Representation

The course is intended as a creative drawing laboratory for designers, an expressive, playful supplement to computer-based labor.

This course will lead students to master techniques in hand drawing, refining sensitivity to all details of what one sees and developing capacity to articulate it in a visually convincing and evocative form.

The class projects will include work in outdoor and indoor situations and places as well as drawings of live models. In the process of drawing, students will focus on the world of lines, textures, shapes, light, shade, and values. We will use various tools, materials, and artistic techniques including pencils, vine charcoal, markers, ink, and other wet and dry media, later combined with the use of cameras, computer renderings, etc.

Throughout the duration of the course, students will complete three larger drawing projects and special short assignments.

In one nonrepresentational drawing project, students will focus on the formal articulation of emotional life experience. In another project, we will explore the performance of the human body in interaction with the built or natural environment. The final project will inspire viewers’ interaction with the architectural environment through the design and implantation of deliberately illusive site-specific drawings, physically inscribed on the Gund Hall interior walls.

In addition, students will participate in the field trips to sketch and draw in the outdoor environment.

Work on projects will be supplemented by presentations and discussions of relevant examples from art history and contemporary art. Guest artists will be invited as reviewers for the presentation and exhibition of final projects.
 

Students enrolled in VIS 2446 will be required to participate in three outdoor workshops and two site visits (Concord, MA and New York, NY), and will be responsible for ground transportation, meals, and incidentals for each of these site visits.