Digital Drawing Pedagogy

The above digital drawings, Hope Incomplete and Light Forms Advance & Dark Recede, explore textures and value contrasts of form relationships (per Mendelowitz's Guide To Drawing )

The above piece, Textural Patterns For Descriptive or Expressive Purposes–19 (aka Physical Distancing Trace|Two Birds|Two Squirrels–19) completes Project 107 of Mendelowitz's Guide To Drawing, 3rd Edition using digital "pen and ink,… introducing textural patterns for descriptive or expressive purposes… such as rocks, brambles, weeds, weathered wood, a derelict automobile in a field that offers interesting surfaces and textures."

By happenstance, this project preceded the release of a NY Times aritcle about 17 Artists Who Capture a Surreal New York From Their Windows.

"Illustration can evoke empathy and bring shared experiences into view as millions of people around the world find themselves in a similar position: staring out their windows, wondering what’s ahead."
—Antonio de Luca, Sasha Portis and Adriana Rami

"Lines are drawn in the mind. There are no lines in nature."
—Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor p.76

The above, Candlestick ca. 2016 Mild Steal (developed from Modelled Stick and Shadows & Space), illustrates 10 hours of my contour, model & gesture techniques digitally drawn of a Albert Paley sculpture, Candlestick (Memorial Art Gallery 2016).

The things you will do —over and over again— are but practice. They should represent to you only the result of an effort to study, the by–product of your mental and physical activity. Your progress is charted… in the increased knowledge with which you look at life around you.
—Kimon Nicolaïdes, The Natural Way To Draw

The above gestural scribbling (with photo backdrop) is of Fredrick Douglass using digital pencil and brush. The colors are inspired by geological minerals from a thermal hot–spring at Wai–O–Tapu, New Zealand known as Artist's Palette.

As reference for the above drawing, left are two photos layered over each other: Olivia Kim's Frederick Douglass monument (Memorial Art Gallery 2019) as the top layer (at 30% opacity) over the thermal hot–spring (also the backdrop in the drawing above).

"I see how much of a responsibility you have as an artist. You are the reflection of our times. So whether you're a writer, or a dancer, filmmaker, painter, or sculpture, you're reflecting the times that you live in and after you are gone, all that is left is that reflection."
—Bisa Butler

"The relationships in art are not necessarily ones of outward form, but are founded on inner sympathy of meaning."
—Wassily Kandinsky

The video below is an animation of my 6–hours digitally drawing a photograph by Robert Polidori, Bedroom. The video ends with six added artifacts from the Memorial Art Gallery digitally drawn by me in 2016.
Music: Beautiful (from Sunday in the Park with George, 1984)

The use of color is necessarily a personal thing. Schools based on the systems of certain painters, no matter how good those painters are, lose the personal experience, the individual evaluation of color, which is necessary to make the effort succeed.
—Kimon Nicolaïdes, The Natural Way To Draw p. 215

Artist Studio ⇔ Digital Drawing Pedagogy

My digital drawing pedagogy strives to emulate paper, pencil, and other physical medium. It is a contemporary art, using a technological medium, while following an anachronistic process. I practice the historical intentions of revered art educators.

The artist’s studio interests me as an abstraction of materials. It showcases the flow from foundation to creation. By understanding an artist’s processes and developments, I seek to grasp the gestalt of artworks.

As an autodidact, I explore the evolution of drawing via a series of virtual mark–making studies. My progressive projects chronologically reference recognized books and teaching techniques. This establishes a conceptual body of art that expresses learning: a digital drawing pedagogy.
—Allen Gregg Fox Galante

My entire pedegogy is a conceptual art logged with titles, schedule/project numbers, signed and chronologically numbered (currently over 6000 drawings) with date and duration of drawing time (in number of minutes) embedded as part of each piece. This encapsulated learning process is where I convey art.

Between 2012 and 2016, I executed over 5500 drawings as a comprehensive study of every lesson in The Natural Way To Draw by Kimon Nicolaïdes. I consolodated a manuscript called The Natural Impulse To Draw. Review both the book and manuscript in a side–by–side preview here.

The digital drawing to the right, Crimean Linden & Dill, suggests foliage via value contrasts and examines, "the elements that give the tree its particular character —the shapes of the foliage masses; the size of the leaves; the size and shape of the areas of sky seen through the masses of foliage; the character of branch patterns, where branches are seen, and so forth."
— Mendelowitz's Guide To Drawing, 3rd Edition Revised by Duane A. Wakeham, p. 81

The animation above is derived from digital drawing #5836 Felix Observes Resistance (homage to William Kentridge's annimated film, Felix in Exile) juxtaposed with Cereal Box Staircase (forground and landscape homage to M.C. Escher Coast of Amalfi December 1931, Woodcut).

"I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings, an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay."
—William Kentridge