I've been taking a drawing class for the winter quarter, and it has been awesome. It was a classical drawing class, so we spent most of the time focusing first on line and then grayscale shading, with a little bit of color at the end.
I spent a lot of time drawing with my Dad as a kid, but never took any art classes in high school or college. So I entered the class with some vague sense of hand-eye coordination, but not any real idea of what to expect.
In the very first class, the teacher gave us giant pads of paper and sharpie markers, and made us do blind contour drawings in sharpie of a centerpiece in the middle of the room. The idea was that people who are just starting to learn how to draw are timid, and draw very lightly and very small on a piece of paper, so our first exercise was to draw large pictures with thick dark lines.
Next, getting art supplies. I had never used any of these things before this class. We got wood-less graphite pencils for sketching (they have a side edge you can use for shading), stretchy erasers, old fashioned pens and bottles of higgins ink, charcoal pencils, and grayscale pastels.
My favorite of these was the pen and ink. You can make very precise or very bold strokes with these old fashioned pens, and fill in large dark areas with a paintbrush and ink.
We spent the next few weeks focusing on drawing objects with lots of little details that the eye normally skips over. Our objects were shells, baskets, trees. The idea here was that most people don't draw what they see, they draw an idea of the object that they see (like a circle instead of an eye, or a straight line instead of a tree branch). But if you force yourself to draw more slowly, see each detail, and draw only what you see, not just shapes you think should be there, this helps you create more accurate drawings.
This was my first pen and ink drawing.
And here's another- we were experimenting with making pen and ink line drawings from color magazine pictures.
Then we moved onto shading and gray values, using a set of 12 gray chalk pastels. This was a completely different focus than the line drawings- we looked only for light and dark, and line was kind of a bonus feature. Most of the grayscale pictures we made ended up having an impressionist look to them. For one class, we took turns posing in the middle of the room and did portaits of each other.
Then we did an exercise where we took a picture from a magazine and divided it up into 8 pieces: one for each student, and each student drew their piece. At the very end we recombined the drawings to form the original picture. This was my piece of the picture.
And here are all the pieces recombined. The lines that should go across each section don't generally line up, but it's fun to compare the different drawing styles of each person in the class.
And here's the original picture recombined- a very old school photo from Ireland.
Here's another grayscale pastel made from a picture of a woman staring across a wrecked barren landscape at her old house. The great thing about chalk pastels is that you can smudge and smear the chalk with your finger to create smooth shadings and highlights, as well as having precise unsmudged details.
And here's one of my new niece, Anna. Faces are very hard to draw. I readjusted little details about her nose and lips many times. One tip our teacher gave us about drawing human faces was that the more line details you draw in a face, the older the face looks. So gray pastels worked well for a baby's face- you can smudge away all the lines in the face, and also smudge in the baby fuzz in the hair.
This was my first color picture. I kind of went overboard with contrast, and am not terribly happy with the overall feel of the picture- it ended up kind of flat, and the perspective is a bit off. But hey, learning is good. I used colored graphite pencils for this.
This was a live action sketch of a drum circle in golden gate park in SF.
