For the whole of this month, I was completely occupied. I signed myself up for several weekend of art classes. The result was productive weekends creating drawings after drawings from morning till night, and a very messy bedroom at the end of the month, from the lack of cleaning.

 

The local art school was offering classes in the weekend as ‘tasters’ for their summer and autumn classes. The classes I’ve signed up for are Life Drawing, Anatomy & Momentum, and Illustration. It was a fruitful experience, being able to learn new techniques of drawing as well as how different people have a different approach to drawings. It was definitely more interesting than the so-called ‘art classes’ that I’ve had in primary and secondary school.

 

 

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For the next few days, I will be illustrating my experience at the classes.

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When I first wanted to signed up for the Life Drawing Class, I was not yet completely aware of what it involved, thought it might be one of the still life drawings. I figured it out by the time I signed up for it though, the administrator specifically said its drawing of the male & female form. Initially, I thought that I might freak out during the class so had to mentally prepare myself. I was quite surprise at how calm I was during the lesson.

 

I couldn’t seem to get what the tutor wanted from me when he made comments on my drawings until he demonstrated what he was talking about for me.

 

SUMMARY

 

Class :              Life Drawing

Description :     Drawing of the Male and Female Form

Medium :          Charcoal, Chalk

Paper :             A1 / A2 Cartridge Paper, Dark Coloured Paper

 

What I learnt:To abandon lines and draw in tone.

 

In detail :     Initially, my approached to drawing was to draw an approximate outline of the form, then add details. The new approach is to observe areas of light and shadow on the human form and breaking them down into a series of simple geometrical shapes, then drawing them.

 

Experience :  I really enjoyed the series of short exercises that the tutor had us perform. Basically, we were to sketch out the form in a series of 1 min, 2 min, 10min exercises. This trains us to quickly observe and find the points of interest on the human body and putting them down on paper as accurately as possible.

                       

Charcoal was also an enjoyable and easy medium to work with. Messy though.

 

For Future :   I do find several problems with my drawing techniques that I need to work on;

-               The strength with which I use to draw a line is often too heavy.

-               The size of my drawings & their layout on the paper. I tend to fit most of the figure onto the paper, when I have seen great results in other people’s work, where they choose to fill the page with the torso, or where the layout is such that there is as little left over space as possible.

 

Next on:          ANATOMY & MOMENTUM