Back to the Drawing Board

There are literal drawing boards in Art School.

I was expecting Art School to be hard but also fun, and it is, but drawing for twelve hours straight every week is giving me all kinds of body pain in muscles I didn’t even know I had.

I’m exhausted.

Art school is physically beating me up.

Probably because I’ve never been a serious artist, it had never occurred to me that artists fall into the category of people who sustain work related injuries.

My teacher says she has to work with a trainer when she’s preparing for a show because the last time she didn’t, she injured her shoulder and her wrist.

Based on how badly my body hurts, I believe her.

Contours and Gestures

We’re drawing our hands a lot in class, and the first class exercise was to draw a contour of my left hand in strong, continuous contour lines with as few hesitation strokes as possible.

My contour drawing of observing my hand

I’m really bad at drawing hands, but I think I did alright, although the size of my thumb and some fingers is wildly exaggerated.

Contour lines are long, deliberate solid lines that capture the outline of an object or subject.

Gesture lines are short, quick lines that capture the feeling and the appearance of the the subject.

Hand contour drawing by my classmate.

My seat neighbour drew this pair of hands for her contour observation, and in my opinion they were the best in the class for the hand contour exercises.

Still Life

On a serious note, fuck this plant.

It was a lot harder to draw than it looks.

Blind Contour

Probably the most annoying yet interesting part of my drawing classes is the blind contour, which involves drawing the subject without looking at the paper.

I think I did fairly well. I tried to keep my hand on the paper and make measured movements using my palm and fingers as leverage to gauge what direction I was moving in.

Blind contour of an arrangement of bottles and tea pots set on a cement block

By comparison, here’s my normal contour below, where I was free to look back and forth from the paper to the arrangement of objects I was drawing.

Normal contour of bottles and boxes, boxes, and tea pots

The whole point of blind contour is to build the mind-body connection of drawing and to focus on observation by looking for things to draw, and capturing every contour you see without worrying about what it’s going to look like.

The last thing we did in contour practice was drawing a pure outline of the collection of objects we observed. The goal here was to capture just the outer contours in order to see multiple objects as a whole, rather than trying to judge which one might be easiest to draw.

Negative Space

This drawing?

I don’t even want to talk about this bloody drawing of three hangers.

My drawing of the negative space between hangers

It might seem like a simple drawing of three objects, but the task here was to draw not the actual hangers themselves, but rather the negative space around the hangers.

Doing this successfully, would naturally result in the form of the hangers appearing.

It’s a lot harder than it looks, and I was constantly fighting the temptation to just draw the actual hangers.

The shading was the worst part. One girl next to me started this class with a normal pencil, but by the end of the class, her pencil was nothing but a little stub.

I’ll rate myself in this class exercise as the best though, or worst case, second best.

When the teacher called time up, I couldn’t even believe the person next to me on the other side was seeing the same thing we were seeing. It’s like they gave up halfway and just decided to draw something while praying for divine intervention.

Figure Drawing

My favourite, but certainly hardest part of class has been live figure drawing where we have a model who poses for various lengths of time.

In my entire life, I think I have only ever done one figure drawing class, where I had the opportunity to draw a person live, and that was all the way back in 2007, so once we started, my first few attempts at this were so horrifically bad.

I am struggling so much trying to learn the box technique for drawing people.

I’ve known about it my whole life, but always avoided it because as you can see, I’m terrible at it, and to make matters worse, I had scarcely finished one or two boxes before the teacher shouted “Time’s up!” ✋🏾

All of my five minute pose drawings were trash.

Absolute rubbish.

When we began ten minute poses, I decided to change strategy.

I can’t die because of boxes. Instead I decided to just draw fewer but more critical boxes (like the head, and the pelvis), and use contour lines and witchcraft to join up the rest.

By the time we got to the twenty minute pose, I was desperate and determined to get a good drawing out of class.

In all the previous drawings, I had done both my boxes and my contours in the same black charcoal, and it honestly was confusing because sometimes I couldn’t see where to put a line because it was obscured by a box corner.

So I decided to switch to red charcoal for my boxes, and do only the contours in black.

I also had to be mindful of speed because this whole time, I had not made a single complete drawing.

I was fighting for my life every second I was working on it, but this last figure drawing of the day is the one I’m proudest of.

My figure drawing of the nude female model

The model also said it was the best one, which made me so proud of myself!

Not bad huh?

One last thing … welcome to my channel 👋🏾

I also decided to give YouTube a shot, and I made a video of all my art school adventures there.

I’m not a Youtuber and I don’t know jack shit about editing so please don’t laugh if my video isn’t all “Hi guys, welcome to my channel”

Please click here to subscribe to my channel

If you laugh, you’ll get diarrhoea.

💛

Lotanna