Sketching Skills

My two favorite tools are a sharp pencil and a pad of gridded/graphing paper. Whenever I set out to make anything, be it a tiny clay deer sculpture or a floor plan, I make a sketch. It helps me work out my ideas and get down to details. I'm a visual thinker, and both of my kids seem to be as well, so I supply them with their own pads of graph paper to plot out their ideas.  The grids have helped Wylie with scale and consistency while he learns to write his name, and Jasper has used it to make comic books, and has recently started drawing pictures in perspective. Armed with with these simple tools it's pretty amazing to see what they come up with... 

The other day my little lady friend Ella came over (you might recognize her from the weaving project) to check out the new children's architectural book series featured last week. I enlisted her to help me work out a few details for a new class I'll be teaching (more on that soon) where we'll need to know a little about drawing in plan view(2-D) and perspective (3-D). She was really interested in Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, she loved how his house was built into the natural environment. Using the grids on the page, she sketched out her own design built into nature, a two story tree house, complete with a tire swing. I hope she builds it one day...