Saturday, August 01, 2009

Spirit of the Sketch Class

Last weekend I took a weekend class called "Spirit of the Sketch". My friend, Leigh Bunkin (findingmywings-leighbunkin) recommended it to me and it was great! Another friend, Ann, also took the class. There were 24 students in all.

Leigh and I worked together last year and we discovered that we both love art and we both participate in Everyday Matters (though I haven't done any of the challenges for quite awhile). I had never met a live person who does EDM. Leigh has just finished a self-challenge to draw and post to her blog daily. Congrats to Leigh for completing her year! She posted her sketches from class on a daily basis: Day 1 , Day 2, and Day 3. I'm going to post mine all together.

We learned lots of neat things in the class:

Gesture Drawings
- this is a quick sketch of the movement or gesture of an object/person. We had from 30-90 seconds to draw each pose. We used graphite pencil, micron pen, brush pen, and three colored pencils. I really liked this because it forced me to be quick and and will help with sketching people in public. Here are just a few of the many poses we sketched:






Memory Drawings - for this exercise, we intently studied a picture for about a minute and then drew what we could remember. The picture was from a calendar and had a number of elements. I found the original calendar picture on the web. It was interesting to see what different people remembered....most people got all of the objects and general colors, some drew in the dog's little red tongue, most people got the purple outfit, but didn't get the sleeves correct. Almost no one remembered the hair exactly. It's a good exercise for capturing an image to draw later.



Drawing Values - we practiced various methods of adding value/shading: pencil shading with watercolor wash on top, ink shading with wash, watercolor shading only, w/c wash with ink on top, watercolor pencil. Ann and I went out to the college garden to draw nasturtiums.



Sketchbook Drawings - we collected natural and human-made found objects and made a page with comments; we copied a painting in the gallery and made our own painting in response and commented; we looked at lots of books and sketchbooks for ideas.


Sketchbook Page Treatments - we practiced collage, paint splatter, color wash, various borders, frames, lettering styles, drawing and writing placement/design.

Contour Drawing - where you carefully follow the outer contour of an object and capture it's shape - we drew right handed, left handed, and blind (without looking at drawing). I drew a padlock on a color-washed background sample.

Face Drawings - we did quick 1 minute sketches of everyone in the class. Mine are too bad to post!

4 comments:

Leigh said...

what a fabulous overview! I sent it to a friend and I edited my day three of the class and put a link there. I feel like I was there all over again! Thanks so much for sharing this...

Shirley said...

Thanks for posting all of this information. It was fun to see what you actually accomplished in the class.

Shalini said...

Nice drawings..! Gesture drawings seem to have been fun :)

Robin Olsen said...

Leigh sent me here and I'm glad she did. Thanks for posting the details of the class--it sounds like fun. I like the other work on your blog too, especially your chicken painting!