Visual Arts Class

As I shared with you all earlier in the week, my son and mum are in Japan (In Tokyo yesterday) at the moment. The earthquake has been a very scary experience, had me freaking out there for a while but I'm very happy to say that my son and mum are safe.


I wanted to share with you all what I've been doing in my Visual Arts Class. 

Yesterday in class we spent the day drawing and painting apples. Mind you I have only been using charcoal. I'm a very precise, neat, clean artist. So I find the messiness of charcoal hard to deal with mentally (even though I understand how to use it), it drives me crazy but I really want to be able to because I love the look of charcoal drawings. There are 9 of us in the class and it has been wonderful to watch everyone's process and results. I'm very slow, I like to take my time, part of the precise part of my nature I guess. Do a bit, step back and assess, do a bit more. Yesterday I got 3 of my 6 needed drawings done. Here is two of my favourites.

This was my second drawing today and I'm pretty happy with the result but there are some areas that I want to do a little bit more work on.

So after sitting there and munching down on one of my apples, this was my 3rd drawing. I really like the way this turned out. 

So this weekend and next week I will be working on the other pictures that I need to get done and then cropping out parts of my drawings that I like the composition. From these croppings I will be picking one to paint in the style of Matisse on a very large scale. Which more than just a little bit scary.

So stay tuned for some more pics.

Visual Arts - Blind Contour Drawing

Last week I had my first day on my new course. This year I'm studying Cert 3 in Visual Arts and Contemporary Craft. But it's hard to call it studying, today I did nothing but paint from the moment I walked into class till the very end of the day.

I thought that I would share with you all one of the very first things that we learnt in class and something we start with any day that we are drawing.

Blind Contour Drawing 

Blind contour drawing is drawing the outlines of an object without looking at the page and without taking your pencil off the page. It really helps to train your hand/eye coordination, by doing this you can train you eye so you can draw what's in front of you.

Link

It really doesn't matter what you are drawing or that what it ends up looking like what you have been drawing. My teacher gets us to draw the same thing over and over again on the same piece of paper. These drawings can then be used to create other pieces of artwork.

Next week I can hopefully remember to take some pics of the artwork that I have been working on from my blind contour drawings.