I am Your Sunshine

Granted that mom put me on sketching classes for at least two summers, Noelle’s always been the painter in the family. But to expand myself, I took beginning drawing this quarter and it’s been both fun and gratifying.

We did contour drawing in the first class. Our instructor, Paul, told us to draw our drawing partner without looking at our paper. The point is to rid us of the conceptual drawing that we’ve been so used to and to really observe. And for the first time in my life, I found that I draw better when I concentrate on the object I’m drawing but drawing itself. I’m not saying my drawing was true to life, but I was able to pay attention to details the way I didn’t know I can.

And then we did a cubist drawing. This is when I felt frustrated with my inability to draw something like I saw it. Other people’s cubic drawings look like interpretation of a thing when mine looks like some bizarre line rendering of something alien.

Then we practiced one point perspective and two point perspective which I felt very comfortable with because it, for me, is science, or more precisely, is mathematics. Tell me the rules to do it, and I can do it. And our next big project was to do a surrealism drawing.
This time, Paul told us to collect images from magazines that strike us as interesting, and then arrange them in smaller pieces of paper according to the eye level. We were to make four of those, imagine what the background would be and sketch it. Pick one that we like the most and draw it on a 24×18 piece of paper.

And this is what I did.

And them we did some landscape practice and we employed a technique called dirt drawing and drew our partner under sharp lighting.

tbc…