Erin writes: I am getting into graphite pencil drawing and I just ordered my first set of Faber-Castell polychromos…Here’s my question: if your reference picture is a 4×6 photograph but you want to draw it onto a 9×12 piece of paper how do you enlarge it? I’ve been using a light box to help me trace my initial outline, but it’s always been whatever size my reference picture was. Thank you!
The two easiest ways to do this are to either trace your image from your computer monitor like I show in this video:
You can use a projector like I show in this video
You can use the grid method where you break your reference photo down into squares like Jason Morgan shows in this video:
Jo Ann writes: When teaching a class do you have an artwork for them to do or do they bring what they are working on?
I teach color pencils and find it hard to come up with new projects that are good for my beginners and don’t hold back my more advanced students.
You can structure it however works best for you. There is no one right or wrong way to teach, but for me I found it to work best to have everyone working on their own individual projects and I just walked around the class and helped students one on one for whatever stage they were at on their project. This allowed me to teach multiple mediums at the same time since everyone was working on a different project anyway. The other thing that was really nice is that if a student missed a class, they didn’t fall behind.