drawing_fundamentals v1.0.0

name: "drawing_fundamentals" description: "Coaches a beginner through drawing fundamentals: line control, shape and form, value and shading, and a 15-30 minute daily practice plan. Triggers on requests to learn drawing, practice exercises, or how to draw better."

Drawing Fundamentals

Purpose

Give a beginner a working drawing foundation they can practice in 15-30 minutes a day: controlled lines, flat shapes vs 3D forms, value and shading, and a repeatable daily drill plan. This is a coaching skill. It produces instruction, critique, and practice assignments, not finished art.

Workflow

1. Assess level. Ask what they draw now (stick figures? copying photos? nothing?) and what tools they have. One short question, not a questionnaire. Assume pencil and plain paper unless told otherwise. If they have never drawn, start at Step 2. If they have some experience, still run Steps 2-3 as warm-ups and spend most of the time on Steps 4-6.

1. Lines (days 1-7). Teach line confidence before anything else.

• The ghosting method (from Drawabox): place two dots for start and end, hover the stroke a few times without touching paper, then commit in one motion from the shoulder, not the wrist.
• Drills: a page of straight lines, a page of curves (arcs, waves, S-curves), a page of super-imposed lines (draw over the same line 8 times).
• Passing standard: lines are smooth and end near the target dot. Wobble is fine; chicken-scratching (many short hesitant strokes for one line) is the habit to break.
• For a human: give one drill per session. For an agent generating practice sheets: output dot pairs and grid layouts in references/line_drills.md.

1. Shapes and forms (days 8-14). Two separate ideas, keep them distinct.

• Shapes are flat: squares, rectangles, circles, triangles. Draw them clean and even.
• Forms are 3D: boxes, spheres, cylinders, cones, pyramids. Teach that drawing = projecting 3D structure onto 2D paper.
• Drills: boxes in simple perspective (one vanishing point, then two), ellipses for cylinder ends (aligned to a center axis, wider as they move away), rotated boxes, stacked forms.
• Passing standard: boxes hold together with no impossible edges; ellipses are symmetrical around their axis.

1. Value and shading (days 15-21). Teach the six values on a sphere, the standard teaching model:

• Highlight (paper white), light (main lit area), midtone (local color, no light effects), core shadow (darkest on the object itself, where it turns away from the light), reflected light (lighter band inside the shadow, from light bouncing off the surface below), cast shadow (on the ground, away from the light, sharpest near the object and softer farther out).
• The line between light and shadow on a sphere is soft and gradual. On a cube it is sharp.
• Drills: a value scale strip of 5-9 even steps from white to black; one shaded sphere per day with a single lamp as reference; apply the same six values to a cube and a cylinder.
• Passing standard: the sphere reads as round from value alone, with no outline needed to see the form.

1. Daily practice plan. One session is 15-30 minutes, same order every day:

• 5 min line drills (warm-up, never skipped)
• 5-10 min shapes/forms drill from the current week
• 10-15 min focused study (this week's concept applied to a real object on the desk)
• When they finish a week at the passing standard, move to the next. If not, repeat. Never advance past a weak line habit: everything later sits on it.

1. Critique. When they show work or describe a problem, diagnose against the layer that is actually broken:

• Wobbly, sketchy contours -> back to line drills, not more detail.
• Flat-looking objects -> value scale and sphere study, not darker outlines.
• Wrong-looking boxes -> perspective and edge checks, not rendering.
• Give one fix at a time, the deepest layer first.

Output Contract

• A practice session assignment: which drill, how long, and the passing standard. Fits in a few lines.
• A critique: what layer is broken, one fix, one drill to run.
• No anatomy, no composition, no style advice: those are later skills. This one ends at: clean lines, solid forms, believable light.

Operating Rules

1. Shoulder, not wrist, for every long stroke. Wrist is for details only.
2. Ink or pen for drills when possible: it removes the erase crutch. Pencil is fine for value studies, where blending matters.
3. One light source per study. Two lights confuse the shadow map.
4. Work light to dark. Leave the highlight as untouched paper.
5. Draw from real objects on the desk (an egg, a mug, a box) as soon as the concept allows. Reference from life beats photos for learning form.
6. Never tell someone to "just practice more" without naming the drill and the passing standard.
7. Every factual art claim in instruction should match a cited source in references/sources.md. If you cannot verify it, say so or cut it.