No class this week--Happy Holidays!

But meet me back here in a week when I'll show you how I tried to draw St Pat's Cathedral with charcoal.
Our teacher is real, real nice. He can't seem to stop himself from teaching. Our semester ended officially weeks ago.

I think I'm going to sign up for another of these drawing classes next semester but I'm not yet sure what to choose, or if I should do it. It seems wrong to spend part of the week drawing and being happy when I could instead spend those same hours writing and feeling nauseous and depressed.

Drawing Class - Week 12: Charcoal; "Jessie" in a dozen poses

Jessie was by far the best model we've ever had.

I've been hating everything I've drawn for weeks and weeks, but I don't hate drawing. I'm not sure why that would be, but I picked a good hobby. I wouldn't have nearly so much fun were I faced with the excruciating results of trying to play the piano or cook or garden. The point of doing most other things is that you enjoy the pleasant results of your skills & I am not patient. Drawing seems more to me like dancing at parties, which I like a lot, even though I'm not good at it and I know that.

Drawing Class - Week 11: Charcoal Sketches, 10 mins or less

that central figure (above) is pretty awesome because my teacher drew it, not me.

I don't feel like talking about the drawings.
The young man is Kevin.

bread and circus

Sick day--no class for me--so no new drawings, but I think this will either pacify you or make your brain explode


[photo of D.H. removed per my mom's request]

Drawing Class - Week 9: Classmates Cartoon #3

more of the same. I didn't finish in time to start adding color (except for that smear of white oil pastel dead center).

no class this week

(Thanksgiving holiday)

His name is JerMajesty

Drawing Class - Week 8: Classmates Cartoon #2

What you are looking at:
same set-up as last week, but facing 2 rows instead of 1.
(we were in 2 joined rows of V's like this, >>>>><<<<< , running east-west across the room, where each 'v' represents 2 students, each seated facing the pointy center.) I'm sitting toward the center of the row, my back to the window, facing NW. The white tape is what we use instead of trying to erase 9B pencil. Lots of white tape this week. The big head centered in the top panel is my immediate neighbor. I'm looking west.
The 4th fellow from the left is the same character who appears as the left-most figure in the second panel. (The purple door dead-center is one of 2 purple wonders in the same classroom. This isn't even NYU!) The yellow rectangles are light-wood supply cabinets and the white and gray vertical stripes in front of them are two sides of a rectangular column. I'm facing north.
For the third panel, I'm looking behind me, toward the eastern wall. The lady on the left is an architect. (The weird shape behind her is the outline of stacked plastic chairs.) The figure next to her is a young Japanese guy here for a year to learn English--he's enrolled full-time at Kaplan?! which apparently offers ESL--and to study art.* Behind him, another white column, with the other purple door to the immediate right. A guy with long hair--I don't know him yet. The girl with glasses from the first day of class. The guy in the stocking cap sitting directly behind me is the blond guy from the far right of last week's picture. He's a working illustrator and this is his second semester. (Several of my classmates are repeat customers.)
Fourth panel: almost the same as the second, obvs, but I'm looking more directly north. I was trying to see what would happen if I chose fewer figures, with more space between them. Turns out it's not good, esp the way i accidentally made space bend back from the giant cowboy hat. The right-most figure is my direct opposite, not the hat guy.

The unfinished painting: I think I like the 3rd panel drawing the best [mostly the hand], but the 2nd panel had a little more variety of shapes and sizes. There was only 1/2 hr left in class when I started adding color, so I started with the things I didn't want to spend too much time on: the cowboy hat, the background and floor, the drawing boards. I finished as much of them as I'd care to. I was just starting on the figures' hair and faces when it was time to clean up. I spent about 5-10 minutes on their skin colors, but not much else. I was hoping to draw their eyes this time! I don't know how to spend 5 minutes and make it look like 25 minutes worth of work. Real artists do it all the time, right? My hunch is that particular skill involves "No More Mistakes."** I was a little disappointed in my time management because I didn't finish the faces, which is the part I like most and that confuses me most. I got a little carried away with making the black blob in the center (stacked plastic chairs, y'all) out of colors other than black.

*He majored in architecture back in Japan. I asked him if he'd study with any architects here--nope. He's here for the English, which he hopes will be useful in his career. I hope English will prove more useful to him than it has for me. I think this might be his first drawing experience. Next year, he's off to Finland, studying "design" for another year. Guts! I like his style of study abroad. It turns out that no one cares if you're earning transferable college credits. He's starting from scratch with the English. (Finnish? Umm, what do you think?)

**which was, yes, my New Year's Resolution for the past 3 yrs running, for those of you keeping track, or who might recognize the phrase. So far, not so good: mistakes at every opportunity. "No More Mistakes" will be every year's NYR from now on or until I'm proficient at my current level of difficulty.

Drawing Class - Week 7: Classmates "comic strip" with eerie hollow socket eyes.

The extremely horizontal format of this last Wednesday's drawing means that I don't have time to scan it in this afternoon and do the Photoshop merging. I'll probably scan it eventually because it's almost pointless to post oil pastel paintings you can't 'click' on to see the strokes close-up, and my digital camera can't capture that degree of detail. And it distorts the straight edges. Also, the scanner gives a more honest representation of the colors. For now, here's a photo for this week. (for all 4? 5? of you kind friends tracking my progress.)

These are a few of my classmates. We are seated in parallel rows, facing each other, drawing each other, and trying to be good models for each other by not moving too too much.

1. We were supposed to fold our paper into four horizontal sections and, in the first section, make an interesting composition with the figures' shapes, perhaps playing off their change in size as they get closer.

2. Second section: vary the composition, perhaps by radically changing the scale of the heads. The three figures here are the 3 left-most figures from the panel above.

3. Third section: make a third completely different composition, and, instead changing the scale again, perhaps by using the negative space in a different way, or perhaps some "other" way. (yeah, me neither.) I was mostly finished with this panel before I realized that all 3 of my panels were pretty much identical. Dang! I'd tried to start them out so differently on the left-hand side of the page, but by the time I got to the right side, I was back drawing the same thing.

4. Fourth section: I didn't know how to make a radically different or even mostly different composition, so I dropped my gaze a little and drew their torsos/drawing boards. Now I realize I should've looked lower and drawn their shoes, which would've been more interesting than a finished row of squarish boards.

5. Color: pick one section and add color to the entire section (not just a cropped section of it or partial color).

So--I think 'composition' was the object of the lesson, or composition-by-cropping. I'm still feeling really weak at composition, so way far lost that I don't really understand why I don't understand it.

One tiny comment my teacher made did help me a lot. I couldn't figure out which panel to choose for color and I was leaning toward the bottom one or the second one, but I didn't think the choice of any of these four made a difference one way or another. He said, "well, yes, it does. Your bottom panel would have too much brown wood, and the second panel would have too much of the same flesh color." So obvious, but in that moment, the coin finally dropped. It's like arranging colored shapes!

It was a long and frustrating night, but I had a Diet Coke to see me through the struggle and so by the end of the class, I was enjoying myself. I kind of like this one! The likenesses are pretty good and I'm feeling a lot more confident layering the oil pastels. Not confident enough to attempt drawing the lines for their eyes because I couldn't even make the pastels give me lines in the right places for their mouths, but just before I left class, I was starting to feel happy about the wall to the left of the purple door and about that center closet door because they turned out close to the colors I was trying to make. Progress! Also, it's easier/more fun to coax out their likenesses in the pastels than in pencil--I don't have to worry so much about mistakes or getting it wrong the first few times and making a mess with the eraser because I can keep layering and adjusting. Also, since you're working with color on the whole entire face instead of inventing arbitrary lines to represent the facial features, it's so much easier to tell if it looks like the person or not.

I like adding color more than drawing lines.

On separate occasions, I showed this drawing to Liesel and to my brother Rob, and they both said, with almost the same words and exactly the same happy intonation, "hey! you're drawing cartoons! a comic strip!" And both times, I was like, "no--cartoons? comics? what are you even talking about?" I see it, okay, I see it.

Drawing New York - Rockefeller Ctr, lower level (still impossible)

First, some junky photos of the night from my crummy camera-phone. You're welcome!

* * *

Bonus Monday night class again. We met at the GE Bldg and went to the courtyard below where you can watch the ice skating from inside, behind glass doors. I'd never been there. It was pleasant and warm. The tree wasn't up yet and the crowds weren't overwhelming.

We were supposed to draw out our panels and add oil pastel to one of the four. I ran out of time, natch, so there's no color. Too busy going hog wild on all those little windows, I guess. I have a difficult time deciding which details to leave out. This surprises none of you who know me at all. It surprises me every time! It's hard for me to simplify a big picture without stripping the heart away. It's a lot easier for me, a beginner, to approximate a scene with masses of overlapping information and hope that some of it turns out right than to isolate and then precisely delineate the few perfect, elegant shapes capable of representing the same thing.

When my teacher came by, he cried, "Good Lord--the data in that thing!" I had been thinking the same thing, but about the world. I'm not used to paying so much attention with my eyes.

Enjoy the wonky 'straight' lines. Charming, aren't they? Every single one goes off track even more perfectly than if I'd planned it.
It's like having a student driver for a right hand.

Long, long ago I had some children's books with wobbly ink illustrations very similar to these--I think a few were set in New York!--and I remember thinking, "why do adults always think kids like messy drawings just because we [kids] can't draw very well yet?" I don't know why I imagined that adults were conspiring to deprive young readers. The pictures were probably great. I remember that the back pages and dust jackets proudly declared the inclusion of original work by artists who were "award winning" (imagine my total disgust).

I'm supposed to be concentrating here on representing the figures as shapes with stylized straight or round lines--no fluid, curvy stuff. I'm trying to do that here but it's a lot harder for me to stylize than to copy what my eyes are telling me and I forgot sometimes to STOP trying to make the pictures look like the real people and to just draw shapes without worrying if they're accurate. The top panel, my first of the night, is my favorite because the people were far enough away that it was easy to turn them into little shapes.

The top panel is looking up to street level, from the rink facing 5th Ave.
The second panel is the ice rink, looking east, below street level.
The third panel looks south toward the cafe tables around me.
The fourth panel looks southwest, same tables. The girl to the far right of the third panel is the same girl centered in the fourth.

I like to draw the other art students because I imagine they're less frightened by my drawing board and my unblinking, unwavering stare.

no class this week

(Halloween parade--the school is on the route)

Drawing New York (is impossible) - Barnes & Noble, Union Sq

I went to a Monday night drawing class with my same teacher. They meet at different sites around town and draw from life. The idea is to be clever and quick enough that you can make a good drawing even when the people move or leave. I did everything wrong! It made me crazy.

We're at the 3rd fl cafe, B&N Un Sq.
(gawker stalker: Aaron Eckhart walked by me as I was getting off the escalator.)




First, here are 2 pictures by my teacher. He did them for me on separate visits around the class when he could see that I was floundering. I include them here so you can see where I was aiming. Can you believe how gorgeous they are? Each panel took him about a minute. It seems so simple when someone else's brains & arm performs the work.

my notes--I made them abt half-way through class to remind myself what I was supposed to be doing. They're kind of funny directions to myself.

aaah! they kept walking away!
I gave up and started again.

it's not working.
and that poor lady in the bottom right corner--she should sue me for visual libel

trying . . .trying . . .really, I was! Drawing sucks.
Not sure why there's a gremlin in the top right quadrant.

I think I know where I'm going wrong, but it doesn't make it easier to do it right.
The guy in the Yankees hat (lower right) was asleep and therefore motionless.

I didn't plan to post these drawings because I wanted to pretend that this night's failures never happened. I've had some--okay, a lot of--candy & now the episode seems funny instead of frustrating.

Drawing Class - Week Six: Ben & Francesca, reading, against reflections in the window

Same materials as always: 2B graphite pencil, oilstick, junky oil pastels, and 23x18 paper folded into quadrants. The drawing is still shape-based, but the color is supposed to be realistic.

This was the best drawing of the night; it had a nice rhythm. You'll just have to trust me on that because I obliterated the nice parts (her head, the pattern of her hair and ponytail, the reflections to her immediate left) with the pastels.
Now I wish I'd used other colors to build up the black instead of using the black stick.

The oil pastels are making me a little crazy. With the way I handle them & the results I'm getting, I might as well be drawing with Crayolas. I'm having trouble making the colors blend and mix into each other. I know it's possible for the finished surface to look luminous instead of caked-on, but I can't manage it myself. Am I not pressing hard enough? How do I make the colors slide into each other instead of stacking up or clogging up the works? If anybody out there knows what I'm missing, please advise.

I do not love drawing bottles. I don't have enough physical coordination to make the two sides of the bottles match each other. I was going to disguise my slip-ups with oil pastel. Well, I lay my efforts naked before you.
I liked drawing Ben. He has an interesting face--very thin, long features--and he holds his head very, very still.
This was Francesca's first night as an artist's model. At first, I wanted to fire her because she doesn't hold the same pose for more than 3 minutes. She just about made me crazy with moving her head around while I was making the first drawing, but I decided I was ready to try drawing her again for the final panel. Good practice, right? (For what, I don't know.)
The sketchy lines underneath the darker sketch are a kind of panicky, scribbled rough draft I marked just in case she never rotated back to the same position. The pose finally represented above isn't the one I started drawing (her head was pointed the other way). I had to modify even my light sketchy draft 4 or 5 times in the same number of minutes. Red. Rum. Well, it was the end of the night--I'm sure she was tired and restless. She's not fired.

Drawing Class - Week Five: Drawing is Hard

scanning and photoshopping are harrrrd too. sorry about the gray rectangles and shadows.

More of that outline-shape drawing stuff.
We were supposed to draw the outlines of the figure's shape and then draw in all/lots of the background lines/shapes connected to the main figure. The idea is to make a coherent composition with interesting shapes, patterns, diagonal lines, whatever. The teacher's 5 minute sample was gorgeous. My versions, umm, errr--I had trouble getting to the background before the models changed.

Meet our models Rebecca and Luke. Rebecca is the same model from the first day of class, the one whose portrait looks like a topographical map.

I ended up drawing everyone's backside all night. I'm going to get to class earlier next week so I can get a better chair.

All the drawings are 9B graphite on paper 18x23, with bits and strips of white tape covering up mistakes I didn't want to bother erasing.

This was a longer drawing, probably 25 minutes. I got it into my head that I needed to draw the chair in silhouette and I fiddled with it for way too long. The teacher called "5 minutes" and I realized I hadn't drawn in any of the background, so I panicked and started scribbling in the windows.

I think it was a mistake. I liked it better when the lacy chair was floating on all that clean white background. I don't think the background works because it doesn't really match. It's too obvious that I didn't draw it with the same care (or fussiness).

For drawing #2, I was determined to get to the background. You'll also notice that this time for the chair, I just drew the thing with as many interior lines as I needed, no more fussy tricks. Well, I started drawing Luke's head a little too big and so his figure ended up huge (and took more time). Once again, I ended up with a 5 minute background. I wish I had drawn more of the floor.

But the radiator? (far right) I like it. At first, I thought "this is the worst object I have ever drawn--it's like I wasn't even trying" but I was too lazy to erase and start over. Now I like how the top and bottom of the radiator don't match, and how it screws up the perspective lines. It seems sort of puppy-like, with a furry bottom and a back leg dragging behind. Hey! Look at me!

The Ten-Minute Sketches

this one I kind of like except for his right paw. I think this is the fastest drawing I've ever done in my life. It felt kind of like cartooning.

Trying to go faster. My least favorite sketch. In life, she's twisted more than the outlines of the drawing suggest, her shoulders are thrown out and back, her right leg is cocked down toward the floor and I have the weirdest angle on her neck and the left side of her shirt. She's actually very thin and well-proportioned. From where I sat (below her), this is pretty much how it looked, but it looks so weird now. I gave her the biggest back in the world. Sorry Rebecca.
another sketch with problems. [This is a "warts-and-all" drawing confessional.] I was doing crazy things at the end of class--miscounting the chair legs, messing up angles because I was looking at one thing and drawing another. I needed a Coke.

Drawing Class - Week Four: figure + big setting of inanimate objects

my teacher told me "inanimate objects help your drawings of live figures, and live figures will help your drawings of inanimate objects." I think he might be right. It looks a lot better after he had me add more easels, etc., in the top right corner and draw in the "Exit" sign.

First, you draw the hair shape

then the head-ear-neck shape
(I was supposed to draw them separate from the hair shapes, and
not supposed to fill in the jaw line)

torso shape, arm shapes, pant shapes

Graphite pencil + oilbar + oil pastels, again.
After talking with me about this picture, my teacher asked if I was a Cancer. (I'm Pisces) "Ah yes," he said. "Same thing." I kind of love him.

Drawing Class - Week Three

the assignment was to draw severely cropped versions of the seated models and to pay attention to shapes, not anatomy. And to draw fast.
The pencil is an 8 or 9B. Next we smeared clear Windsor Newton OilBar all over to smear around the graphite and give some slippery action to the color on top (like turpentine under oil paints). The oil pastels are those cheap Loew Cornell $7 for 60.


The parts that look scraped away (the red legs, for ex.) are where I got carried away and had to scrape it off with a razor blade before trying again.

he had the most amazing, best-shaped hair

the hand and wrist turned out okay. You'll have to click & blow up the picture to see what I mean. The rest of the picture, esp the head? DISASTER!

Drawing Class - Week Two

Kevin

charcoal drawings of models--they were lit by strong spotlights so we'd have nice sharp easy-to-draw shadows on their clothes. I included the third photo as my half-hearted gesture toward indicating scale. The paper is abt 17x23, if you're wondering. This was the first I'd used charcoal. They're kind of weird to hold. Some people in my class used their fingers to smear it around & I swear they achieved photo-realistic effects for the flesh. Incredible! Meanwhile, I'm scribbling in the corner like it's a twig-shaped Marks-A-Lot.
I made a mistake on the hair in the second drawing. The model had black hair and I colored it black on the left side, where the light hits. It looks weird because black indicates shadow everywhere else. I should've outlined it and left the inside of the shape blank.