Taking My First Art Course

I decided to take an art course. It came advertised and organised through my local art gallery and I had met the teaching artist briefly before so I decided to go for it. It teaches Line, Tone and Form and in the first lesson we learned about „measuring“. That is when an artist holds out a pencil toward the object to be painted and uses the pencil to measure everything! It is tedious, I can see it can have its uses and I hated it. I got really frustrated and felt kind of stupid towards the end and I drifted off a bit mentally and started to embellish the boots I was supposed to measure...

Yes, I can be a little devil ;-)

Then yesterday was the second part of the course, we used different types of charcoal to draw some tasteful scenes our teacher had prepared for us. It always starts out with us making a 5 minute drawing of a scene we have before us. Then we do a blind drawing of the same scene, where we can look at the scen but not at what we are drawing, that is always funny and I really enjoy it...

Yeah, this is already a lot better than the first time I used this technique, we do this to help slow down our eyes to be able to see more details. we started drawing with compressed charcoal.

We did another round of blind drawing and I tried to focus more on the fabric folds in the background.

Then we follow this up with a line drawing, we can look at both the paper and the object, but we are not allowed to lift the pencil/charcoal off the paper, it has to be done in one continuous line. Again this is to help slow the eyes down even further.

I really should practise this at home a lot more, my eyes tend to dart over the objects way too fast... and I am still drawing parts of the same still life...

Now we had a lot more time for our drawing (20minutes) and we had to use the full side of the compressed charcoal and not the pointed edges. First block in very lightly where everything is and then get to the details later. I loved doing this...

Then we switched places around a little to get to draw different scenes (I think most participants stayed where they were).

First we used willow charcoal to give our sheet of paper a medium tone, then we used a range of charcoal sticks, erasers and paper stubs to work out the lights and darks of the scene before us. I found this very difficult because I tend to work and think more in outlines than lights and darks and tonal range. I had not worked with a monochrome range before and it was also new to me to take colour out to create highlights. I still like how it turned out, maybe because I did not feel nearly as frustrated as with the boot measuring...

I am looking forward to the last part of the course...