Drawing Class on Thursday

Thank you for all your nice notes!

I still do not have my mid-term grade. She was not able to get them all finished during the class period but she promised we would get our pictures  back and our grades at the next meeting which is next Tuesday. We all put our pictures up on the wall and she gave us a list of questions to answer as we introduced our picture. I can’t remember all the questions but one was "What did you have in mind besides doing the assignment when you drew this picture?" Now, as it happened, I was illustrating a story I was making up about a town of the future where everyone lived in these high-rises. The tenants were encouraged to band together and decorate the outsides of their building and prizes were awarded for the best ones… She told us she was very impressed by what we had done because it was obvious that most of us had spent a lot of time on what we had done. Apparently she teaches the same class during the school year when the students only meet once a week and gives the same assignment. We had 48 hours to do ours and most of them were pretty good.

Then we started work with ink and pens. She did a brief demonstration of various strokes one could make with ink and a pen and told us to go practice some of the strokes she had shown us. Next, we chose a piece of grass or a small branch for those she had brought in and did our first drawing. I did a piece of grass, the kind that has a seed head. I may try to get it up here tomorrow. Next Jean {the instructor} told us about Vincent Van Gogh who sent his painting to his brother Theodore to sell and kept an ink drawing of every one so he would know what he had sent. She passed out copies of some of these and we discussed his techniques. The assignment was to make a copy of one of these drawings and we have to finish it for homework. I am  doing "The Peasant." Making copies is an excellent learning technique because one has to really look at what the artist did. This is one of his drawing that have a background of dots which are , I know, going to drive me insane! In addition, we have to plan out and make a brief sketch of a landscape {from real life, a photo or our imaginations} and have it ready to draw in in ink in the style of Vincent Van Gogh in class next week!

I will work on my Van Gogh copy tomorrow because tonight I am doing absolutely NOTHING and enjoying it enormously!

Until later..