King Alfred School Drawing Course with Howard Vie

The King Alfred School is a new school offering a classical Christian education. TAG was asked if they could suggest someone to help develop a traditional architectural drawing course to attempt to cultivate in our students an appreciation for our country’s architectural heritage. Howard Vie developed an outline of such a course and was invited to teach two sessions. He writes:

‘The first session we covered the very basics of drawing. The act of looking at something and putting down marks on paper. The role of the pencil and paper and yourself. We practised different lengths and speeds of marks with different hand positions. After some drawing of objects we continued with shading and tones and applying these to our drawings’

‘The second session was to cover perspective. I explained that this was a very big topic and that I would try an approach this through observation. Firstly though I showed some A1 sized architectural perspectives and trying to show the magic of representing the 3D world on a flat sheet of paper. I introduced the idea of the eye point and the picture plane. I had some actual frames with an A5 aperture which I gave to the class. Having explained that we transfer what we see in the frame on to the paper, and suggesting the natural distance to do this we drew various parts of the room, with me suggesting some rules of thumb for perspective drawing’

Although pleased with the first session, Howard found that the second session on perspective’ could do with some tweaking to make it simpler and more direct’.

‘The school and children, there were 7, aged 7-10, were delightful and overall it was a most interesting experience’