I have completed six weeks of my drawing class so far, eighteen hours of class time wholly dedicated to learning to draw.
My drawings have progressed from this first one where I really struggled with the lines and angles.
To this second drawing where I applied the techniques of optical measuring and and transference of angles. Which simply means I shut one eye and held a stick out in front of me and transferred the angle shown by the stick to the paper.
These next two photos are three weeks worth of drawing practice. The table was set up with one box on top of it and two boxes underneath it. Negative space was introduced, which is the space in between things. Negative space is also where I do a lot of my daydreaming. I find myself looking at objects in relation to the other objects around them, the light and tone will capture me and before I know it I have lost time again.
I am having a lot of trouble with proportion and you would not believe how absolutely tricky it is to get the proportions of the boxes correct in relation to the table. But at the same time I wouldn’t have believed how much I am enjoying the challenge of trying to get the proportion right as well.
Week five we all covered our work with conte rubbed onto a piece of rag and set out to explore light and tone using a rubber (eraser) as a drawing tool to highlight the light and a 6b piece of conte to shade in the dark.
I am now having some moments in the class where I am moving away from the white knuckle terror of drawing and I ever so fleetingly hit that sweet spot and think, Oh Yes I can do this, and then just as quickly the moment vanishes and I am left grappling with lines and angles again and everything looks very wonky.
Drawing takes a hell of a lot of concentration and I have to keep on forcing myself to concentrate on the task at hand instead of slipping off somewhere else within my mind.
As well as learning to draw, I am learning to keep a journal as part of a research project. I have always kept a written journal, which has morphed into this blog. I have never had the discipline nor the inclination to really work at keeping an organised journal of my ideas regarding my work. I have bits and pieces of ideas scattered all about the place. Scraps of paper pinned up to the wall, notes to myself stuffed into cracks in the bookshelf, thousands and thousands of photographs like these next two shots. I have bits of music saved because they remind me of ideas and my head is so crammed full all the time that I lose more ideas than I manage to keep. Hopefully the journal will help rein all those ides in and contain them in one place.
When I was thinking about writing this post this morning I looked outside at the sky and saw this cloud and thought it would be a good image to illustrate how I see things in relation to my work. I am interested in the negative space where the cloud breaks on the right hand side of the photo and there is an almost geometric pattern. There is a horse in there as well. I would like a version of this patterning around the edge of a plate.
I fiddled with the colour levels of the photo to highlight what I mean.
These are the sort of things I do. I am always looking into things and seeing things in terms of light and shade and degrees of tone and a quick trip outside in my nightie at 6 am this morning to feed the ducks stretched out into a twenty minute contemplation of clouds. Welcome to my world.
I am a keen birdwatcher, amongst other things and I remember years ago when I was watching a grey shrike thrush perched on the side of one of my frog ponds. I saw the bird and thought nah it’s only a shrike I wont bother with it, but I got up and got the binoculars anyway. I am pleased I obeyed my impulse because the little bugger was catching tadpoles and I spent an enjoyable five minutes watching him.
The lesson I learned from the bird was to always have another look, to always look deeper.
I hadn’t thought about drawing before as a tool to look deeper until I was listening to a talk given byProfesser Donald Lawrence at the Art Forum yesterday. Mr Lawrence said he uses drawing to solve a technical problem or simply to spend time really looking at something.
That quote resounded deeply with me.
I don’t know how The Spouse will feel about me spending even more time looking at things, but at least now I have my studio and the space to do the looking in peace.
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Drawing uses a different part of your brain and it takes time to “switch”. Many people just don’t “get” the looking at things. It’s like moving into another dimension. I love it. Your drawings are getting better for the growth in your vision. That Conte one is very striking.
The thing that I struggle with isn’t the “looking” or the seeing, it is the translation of a three dimensional object to a two dimensional medium. I keep on wanting to go around or through the paper 🙂
Definitely improving Kim. It IS hard to make that transition from 3D to 2D and given your background in ceramics it must be even harder to restrict your eye to the flat surface of a piece of paper. And perspective is a bugger!
Love the cloud photos. We have clouds at the moment because we’ve finally had some rain – with more to come supposedly. Given the parlous state of the dams down here in the southwest that is a good thing but I have to say my bones don’t like it one little bit 😉
I sympathise with you Sharon, bone aches aren’t any fun. I thought I coudn’t draw because I was stupid, now I know it is because I was empathising with the object. It is cool to know.
There is a vast, vast improvement going on here!!
I know it amazes me 🙂 Each week when I go into the class and look at the previous weeks work the improvement snaps me out.
I find the 3D-2D an issue as well. I’ve never been an arts student, unlike most of my peers.
But you will be a very very good Lawyer Kelly.
Your conte drawing is very good!
I’m truly envious of anyone who can pick up a pencil and draw something, anything, that’s immediately recognisable.
Yes. I know what you mean River.
So, so interesting.
I love to draw and paint, when my hands are working I will spend hours with the kids doing sheet after sheet. Occasionally I will do something I like, like at Christmas when we gathered gumnuts and bark to paint with the kids and I doodled something on a piece of foil that we’d given one of the kids to use as a palette. That’s being framed because Beefy and I both like it so much but most of the time I can get no good sense of dimension and shape into anything I try. It has to be a random moment with no thought for it to work. Playing with light and shadow is a complete nightmare, my brain just won’t do it.
It’s quite frustrating as my father’s side of the family are all just amazing natural artists. The stuff they all did/do, even as kids, the stuff that flows from them as easy as breathing, blows my mind and I wish that I’d inherited that natural talent. I’m really impressed with the effort you’ve put in to learning something that didn’t come so naturally, I’ve always assumed that you either had it or you didn’t but maybe there is more room for learning than I realised.
xx
I hear you Ali, Oh I hear you. I really truly thought that I would never ever be able to draw. I sometimes had bursts of creative drawing energy, very similar to yours actually but they were few and far between. Until I started this class I was resigned to the fact that I would never draw anything. now look at what I am doing. 🙂
What a journey you’ve begun with the drawing class Kim. Sounds like the looking at part is leading to much wider insight into your self, not just the objects. Have fun 🙂
It’s great to see like you with a god-given talent on how to draw. I love how the way you write this article and I was also inspired by one of your post about the sculpture that denotes loneliness.
Michelle