That's right... I can draw...
Mar. 13th, 2009 12:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Illumination class tonight turned into a back-to-basics drawing class. Not life drawing, per se, but taking pictures from books, and sketching, rather than tracing. The hardest part for me is not making that first mark on the paper... it's hard for that to be wrong. The hardest part is making all the other marks match up to that one.
Found a book of Leonardo daVinci's sketches, and found his cats. He drew lovely cats. I like cats. I stared at a little 1 1/2" square picture of a cat for several minutes, pencil in my hand, poised to make that first mark, and never did... Kerry then offered me charcoals. Really? Oh. Oh yes. I would like some of that, thank you.
Tonight was the first time I'd even touched charcoals in about six years. I'd forgotten how much I love using them. I get it. It works, in my brain, and it's quick to lay down basics, then we worry about the details, which can be kinda fuzzy, just based on the property of the medium itself. I love the smushing and playing with texture and getting black dust over EVERYTHING. Though I must say, I stayed a lot cleaner than usual...
Attempts with an ebony pencil on a lily sketch went better than they could have; I still to be more patient, and just poke away at it. The page I'm copying isn't going away, and is not going to change at all. It's also much, much easier to copy a black and white drawing in black and white than it is to actually draw something real, sitting in front of you. Somebody else already figured out where the shadows need to be in a drawing...
Found a book of Leonardo daVinci's sketches, and found his cats. He drew lovely cats. I like cats. I stared at a little 1 1/2" square picture of a cat for several minutes, pencil in my hand, poised to make that first mark, and never did... Kerry then offered me charcoals. Really? Oh. Oh yes. I would like some of that, thank you.
Tonight was the first time I'd even touched charcoals in about six years. I'd forgotten how much I love using them. I get it. It works, in my brain, and it's quick to lay down basics, then we worry about the details, which can be kinda fuzzy, just based on the property of the medium itself. I love the smushing and playing with texture and getting black dust over EVERYTHING. Though I must say, I stayed a lot cleaner than usual...
Attempts with an ebony pencil on a lily sketch went better than they could have; I still to be more patient, and just poke away at it. The page I'm copying isn't going away, and is not going to change at all. It's also much, much easier to copy a black and white drawing in black and white than it is to actually draw something real, sitting in front of you. Somebody else already figured out where the shadows need to be in a drawing...