DrawAble: Straight Line Drawings with Lorna Rose

Notes for teachers

• What is the aim of this exercise?

  This resource allows children and teenagers to develop their observational drawing and mark-making skills. 

  As the children are encouraged to only use straight lines, it may promote a different way of looking and seeing objects and environments. The addition of mark-making, collage and/or stitching allows children to expand and personalise their drawings.

• What age can this exercise be used with?

  This resource is easily adaptable and can be used with children aged 6-13 and beyond.

• How long does this exercise take?

  This exercise will take between 30 minutes and 2 hours. The length of this activity will depend on the complexity of children’s chosen environment, the amount of detail in the drawings, and whether any additional materials are used.

• How do I measure success?

  Encourage children to look closely at their drawings, and talk about the challenges they encountered

  How engaged were the children by the activity? Did they enjoy the restriction of making a drawing using only straight lines? 

  How did using a straight edge to build the drawing feel different from other drawings they have made?

  What difference did adding the stitch marks make to their drawings – did they like the additional textures and colour the materials contributed to the drawing?

  Were they able to identify the dark and light values from their environment and build up areas of tone in their drawings using a variety of shading techniques ? How confident did they feel about using these drawing methods?

  More able children may want to experiment with different mark-making in their drawings (or use their previous knowledge of mark-making) and including more experimental hand stitching, increasing the complexity of their drawings.

  Demonstrating different mark-making techniques (or practising them before starting this activity) may be beneficial for less confident students. If children are adding stitching to their drawings, they may want to punch holes in the paper before adding stitches.

  Drawings could be made with other media to explore colour using coloured pencils, ink, watercolour or thinned acrylic paint (so that the surface is not too thick to sew through) and introducing coloured threads and papers.

  To extend the activity, children could make drawings on a larger scale (A1 or rolls of paper) either on their own or collaboratively and experience the challenges of scaling up marks and materials (use tape, wool, or thicker threads and found collage papers or papers previously decorated with mark making)

• What can we try after this exercise?

  These projects use stitch, drawing and collage:

  Filling a Sketchbook: Ruler Drawings

  Make a Stitched Drawing of your House in an Hour

  Draw your Home: Collage, Stitch and Fabric Crayons

  Other resources exploring mixed media, collage, textiles and observational drawing.

  Try other DrawAble exercises and projects. 

• Which artists might we look at?

  Sue Stone creates stitched, figurative compositions. 

  Rosie James draws with stitch on the sewing machine.

  Claire Coles stitches onto paper and uses collage to create wallpaper murals and appliqué artworks.

  Izziyana Suhaimi combines drawing on paper with hand stitching

  Jason Kriegler explores paper, sumi ink and hand embroidery

  Diane Meyer hand stitches onto photographs but this could easily be transferred to drawings

  You may also want to look at Lorna Rose’s website.