Pencil Drawing Fundamentals for Beginners - a one day workshop with Paulus Kooij

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This one-day foundation course is built for beginners and for anyone who has never had the fundamentals properly explained. 

MEMBER: $90

NON-MEMBER: $110

Pencil is where drawing begins — not because it appears simple, but because it strips the problem down to its essentials. No colour to hide behind, no medium tricks. Just your eye, your hand, and the long relationship between them that runs from the cave walls at Lascaux through Leonardo's silverpoint studies to the graphite pencil you'll be holding today. The tool has barely changed in two centuries; what changes is whether you know how to see before you draw.

This is a beginner’s course. No experience needed; no natural talent assumed. What's needed is a willingness to slow down and look properly — most drawing problems are seeing problems in disguise. By the end of the day, you'll have the core toolkit every representational drawing skill is built on, and a finished drawing of your own to prove it. 

This matters beyond pencil itself. Every painting approach, however direct or colour-led, depends on the same underlying loop: looking at a subject, judging what you see accurately, and translating that judgment into a controlled mark. A pencil is simply the fastest, cheapest way to drill that hand-eye coordination with tight feedback — which is exactly why it remains the traditional starting discipline regardless of which medium or style you end up working in. If you already paint but feel that loop breaking down under you, this course rebuilds it directly.

All abilities are welcome.

What you will Learn

Materials & Fundamentals

• Understanding the pencil hardness scale (H to B) and what each grade is actually for

• Choosing paper, erasers (kneaded vs. plastic), and smudging tools

• How to hold a pencil for control versus for freedom — they're not the same grip

• Setting up your drawing station: angle, light, distance, posture

Seeing Structure

• Breaking any object down into simple geometric forms — sphere, cube, cylinder — before a single detail goes in

• Basic perspective: how forms recede and rotate in space

Building Form with Value

• Reading and assessing value — the single most important skill in drawing

• Core shading techniques, and how smudging and erasing are drawing tools in their own right, not just corrections

• Edge control: where a line should disappear and where it should hold firm

• Working on toned/coloured paper backgrounds and why they change your value approach

Applying It

• Structured exercises rendering a ball, cube, and cylinder — the three forms every complex object reduces to

• Texture rendering and highlight placement

• Negative drawing — building form by drawing what's around it

• How the angle and direction of light reshapes everything you've just learned

The Final Hour

The day closes with a full hour of uninterrupted drawing time: an object placed in front of you, everything from the day applied at once, start to finish.

Details

Format: One day, 6 hours

Level: Beginners — no prior drawing experience required

Materials

Bring your own pencils (HB, 2B,4B), paper, smudger, a cotton rag, paper stumps, sketchbook A3 or A4 size, and erasers.

About Paulus

Paulus Kooij is a Sunshine Coast-based visual artist working across watercolour, oil, acrylic, pastel, pencil, and plaster sculpture. A retired industrial chemist and project manager, Paulus brings a precise, technically grounded approach to teaching — breaking painting down into principles that genuinely explain why a technique works, not just how to copy it. He teaches watercolour, acrylics, oil, pastel and other media through local groups and gallery-based courses, and is known for hands-on, demonstration-led classes where questions are always welcome.

Tea and coffee will be provided. Please BYO lunch.

create@noosaartsandcrafts.org.au

(07) 5474 1211