Drawing, Drawing, Drawing

The painting class ended, and now I'm taking a longer class in Beginning Drawing. I'm hoping that the skills that I'm learning in the class can transfer to what I'm doing with my quilts. What I want is to feel like I'm not so limited in what I can create. Yes, I love trees. Yes, I love a good landscape. But, I don't know that I want my message to be limited by the things I can draw. So it is that I'm working on still lifes in my drawing class. Here are some of the things I've done so far:


On the first day of class we did some gesture drawings, which means that you work really fast, and use sweeping movements to create a picture of what you're looking at. It's meant to be a warmup for the main drawing, but I find it's a good way for me to get out of my own head and put lines to paper. In the end, it's not as scary as I make it out to be.









Along the same lines, we did some mass drawings, which were similar, but you used the whole piece of charcoal to create areas of shading and fill in between the lines. But, it was still a fast drawing, with not much time for second-guessing, and no time for erasing. I was surprised at how liberated I was by the process.










On the first day we also did some contour line drawings, in which you draw with one continuous line--without picking up your charcoal. It makes for an interesting look. Especially when you're then asked to do it without looking at your paper (blind contour). The first of these pictures was a contour drawing, the second a blind one. Isn't it pretty?




Finally, I'll leave you with some drawings from the second day of class, where we spent an hour (rather than 2-4 minutes) on each drawing. Our focus was different materials: metal, wood, and glass.