#80 - #84 of 100 Creations in 100 Days: Drawings from Teaching Drawing

One of the things I appreciate about teaching drawing is that, occasionally, I also get to draw!  Sometimes I draw as a demo for students. Other times I draw while they do. Either way, it's such a pleasure to feel my pencil glide across the paper, to see the image evolve, to find the darks and lights. I love working with color, but drawing in graphite was my first love and still has my heart every time I do it.

#81

The exercise for the pears was a chance for students to pull together everything they'd learned in class up to that point - volume, line, value, shadow, and more - and put it into one picture - no pressure! I find they seem to be glad to work for an hour or more on a picture with no pressure to rush - just the delight and absorbing pleasure of working until they feel finished.

#80

And then there are the still lifes... When I was in school, I found these so boring - such stupid items placed together in such dumb ways - what was the point?! Now as a teacher, I have a different understanding - it helps students tackle composition and complicated images. It's a chance to work on the relationships between items and to draw difficult objects like glass and to practice creating form using value. Now I kinda like doing them.

#82

#83

One of the exercises I give my students in Intermediate Drawing is to bring in a single object which is rather complicated. Then I give them the assignment to draw it at least 10 times in 10 different ways (using gesture, blind contour, modified blind contour, super-sized, 1" small, etc.) using different materials each time - pencil, charcoal, peelable charcoal, pen, etc. It tends to be a challenging exercise as it stretches a student's ability to think of different ways to approach the same subject and to keep it interesting.  Below is my drawing of our wire cutters.

#84

#37, #38, #39, #40 of 100 Creations in 100 Days: Visual Journal entries, memorial to Lisa Fisher Johnson

Feb 7, 2019 was all about teaching and playing in my visual journal.  There are times when I don't have the energy to stand and work at the easel and I don't have any big ideas. That's when I pull out my journal and let myself riff on ideas that have been rolling around in my head for a while.  It's easeful and relaxing and generally satisfying.  It's about process, not product.  It's so good for me to move away from a product orientation because I generally don't let myself play and try new things enough.

Before I got into the studio, I taught my "Zentangle Ladies". They're a group of women to whom I was initially teaching Zentangles, but the group has morphed into a lovely amalgam of friends who do art together.  Right now I'm teaching them the Fundamentals of Drawing.  The first lesson I always teach is Blind Contour Drawing.  One of the more advanced lessons with Blind Contour is having them draw the person sitting across from them.  This drawing is by one of my students, Barbara.  I posted it because I absolutely love it!  It's funky and fun and weird and wacky and wonderful!  And it even captures the essence of the woman it's of.  It excites me when my students make such fun work!

Once my wonderful students left, I went out to the studio to play.  I worked with circles and Citrasolv and photos and whatever else was on my table. When we were in Wintergreen a few weeks ago, I began the picture on the left with all the intersecting circles.  It's based on fabric created by Knoll. 

I had the idea to take a page from a National Geographic magazine which I had doused in Citrasolv (it makes fascinating textures as you can see on the right hand piece) and cut circles out of it in the pattern of the piece on the left, then to glue it around the circles drawn there.  That didn't work well because I simply wasn't precise enough, but it did give me a lot of cool circles - and another idea!  The piece on the right was the result of those experiments. (The software for Blogger is again making me crazy!  I can't get the B&W ink drawing to stay next to the Citrasolv Circles, so the layout looks shabby.  Apologies!)

#38 Citrasolv Circles

#37 ink drawing based on fabric
design by Knoll

#39 Collage, photographs, calligraphy, citrasolv page

#39 I've been working with images of my husband Chris for a while.  I took a series of pictures of him to use in a David Hockney-type portrait collage.  I didn't end up creating that, but I have used the pictures to weave with, and, on this day, I used them to illustrate the quote "Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed."

January 26th, my esteemed colleague and dear friend Lisa Fisher Johnson passed away. She had had a brain tumor. She was an amazing artist and one of the kindest, friendliest people I've ever known.  She was a marvelous person and a good friend.  I will miss her terribly.  I attended her memorial service and the reception afterwards where I was hoping to talk to people and to share my memories and grief, but I ended up feeling a bit too shy to approach people to talk.  I left early and came home and created my own memorial to Lisa, these pages, where I wrote about my feelings and thought about how dear she was to me.  Art can be so healing.

#40 Memorial to Lisa Fisher Johnson

Creations #35 and #36, class exercises: drapery and an orange

February 6, 2019

Creations #35 and #36

Tuesday evenings I teach Introduction to Pastel Drawing, and Wednesday afternoon I teach Intermediate Drawing at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.  I feel so blessed to have the opportunity to work with artists at the beginning of their journeys.  It's an exciting thing to watch someone discover that, in fact, they can render something accurately! There's plenty of frustration and hard work, but the delight and satisfaction make it all worth it.

The most challenging exercise I have students take on in Pastels is a self portrait.  It's daunting for just about anyone to draw themselves, but these are students, for the most part, without a lot of drawing experience.  I teach them the basic proportions of the face then have them draw that, life-size on their sanded paper. Then they are to look in the mirror and create their own unique characteristics in the drawing. (We create strong contrast by the use of a clip lamp so the values are more easily discernible.) The next step is to choose three values, any hue, and to place them accurately on their drawing. The final step is to use the correct hue and value to their sketch, add a background, and do what's necessary to finish their portrait.   I am consistently in awe of the portraits the students create.  Here is week one and week two for my student Edson and the final product for Telly as well.

On Wednesday afternoon, I taught the students one of the many ways to go about drawing drapery - something traditional ateliers will spend months learning how to do.  They get 2.5 hours!  Oh well - it's a start! 

The primary task to drawing drapery, in my opinion, is to look, really look at what you're seeing. Try to decipher where the distinct edges are where the blurry edges are. What's causing the shadows? How can you tell the difference between a fold and a drape? Can you tell how the material is hanging?  Once those querries have been considered, the students just have to get to work to try to make sense of it all.  I don't know of any shortcuts to making drapery look realistic - just plenty of hard work.  My students often laugh and exclaim, "And people think an artist's life is easy! Ha!"

#35 Drapery study created during class as my
students worked on their studies.

The week before self-portrait week in Pastels class, I teach students about value and how to get a sense of form using hue and value. We use simple fruits and vegetables for this exercise as they're not too hard to draw and provide interesting color changes which are challenging to render accurately.  We'd already studied color, form, and composition in other sessions, so this was the opportunity to combine all those lessons in one drawing.  Below is the demo I created in that class.  Over the years I've drawn perhaps 100 oranges for class and for my own explorations.  I don't ever tire of them - there are so many possible combinations of color, light, background, shadow, composition - it's fun trying to come up with something new.  

Just for fun, I'll include some of the other oranges I've drawn over the years.  Some are finished, some not quite. Which one is your favorite?

2019

Much less finely rendered.  I enjoy the
energy of this one.

Another one with a lot of energy

All the others are pastels. This one is a small oil painting,
6"x6".

Created on a beach vacation one year. The reflections
are from windows through which I could see
the ocean!