Draw!

During the last week, I treated myself to a two day drawing course at a local college. These are the results!

Sketch No. 1 (Graphite) – quite clearly basic shapes, warm-up…

Sketch No. 2 – with more confidence, more shapes/variety. 

Moving on – new motif – pillow on chair, how exciting… – and we were instructed to draw with our usually non-dominant hand, which in my case means making a left-handed attempt. For some reason, diagonally across the page:

And for some reason, left-handed was more enjoyable and more successful than right-handed – but we did also have a 2 minute time limit all of a sudden!

From here, we moved on to trying to capture weight and textures – a jar landed on the pillow…

The first afternoon was spent outside – this (charcoal) tree came about in various stages, I liked it a lot in-between, I wish I had taken a photo after stage one of its creation. The teacher suggested I add another layer, and leaves, and now it seems rather dark and cramped and rather less beautiful. By the way, the blackbird did sit there for a moment…

Day 2 started with fruit… And drawing on an easel. A few sketches first. The graphite tangerine I enjoyed, in charcoal it clearly didn’t go so well. Tell me what you think the fruit above the tangerine is. I wonder if you’d know…

The afternoon was spent on creating a bigger still life – a few sketches first to try out sizes and shapes, angles and motif. I tried to get a fan next to the sunflowers, and left it out in the end. I sat too far away to see it properly anyway.

Sketch 1

Sketch 2

This is what I arrived at in the end –  a charcoal drawing of sunflowers on a table, and the window, brick wall and mirror indicated in the background.

(it’s the paper that curves at the left, not the window…)

I really enjoyed the experience a lot – I learned quite a few new things. It’s the first time I worked with both graphite and charcoal, the first time I felt that working on an easel worked. And the teacher pointed us to a great number of artists whose drawings I now look at very differently, and with quite a bit more interest. I’d love to go deeper with this interest, work more on it, try out more, spend time with this. It’s a wonderful thing to find activities that totally absorb one’s mind! 

Well, I’ve got their autumn course programme… There may be more drawing ahead…