Drawing class: Part 1

Starting today I'm going to start uploading the work I've done for my drawing class. It's not going to be anything really spectacular, but it might be fun to read about how the class is going and the little adventures I had in drawing all this stuff. I'll post these slowly so I don't lose interest in my little blog here and I can set a pace to do this daily (or weekly, or some kind of regular interval). You'll have to forgive the image quality on some of these, as most are far too large for my scanner and I have had to use a digital camera to get the images up.

That being said, here is day 1:


This exercise had us going out into the lovely yard around the school and sitting in the grass and the sun and drawing a tree in any style, from any angle, and pretty much any way we wanted. The only thing that was asked was that we draw the best tree we possibly could. I went out and decided that I didn't want to draw a billion leaves so I found a nice little dead branch and started drawing that. I found a fun little bit of narrative in the little green leaf just right of centre reaching up from the dead and broken part to the bunches of more healthy leaves up above on the right. It seemed kind of sad and lonely. I embellished it a little bit to make the leaves look like they were reaching for each other. They will be united again in the fall...in death. Hmmm...so depressing.

On a more technical side, I used a pencil on newsprint for this. Most of the shading and colour I did by just smearing with my finger. It's not very good, especially compared to some of the drawings the other people in my class did. The contrast is way too low, it's hard to see a damn thing on there. The whole thing feels very dull and doesn't catch the eye much at all. Nonetheless, I enjoyed drawing it on a beautiful day in a lovely park so I guess it all evens out in the end.

I'll have the second part of this assignment up tommorow, wherein we draw the same tree in the worst style we possibly can. I won't say too much, but the teacher actually complimented me that it really was the worst tree in the class! hahahaha high praise!


Just as an aside, if there actually is a person whom I don't know reading this blog (and possibly enjoying it?) please check out these other blogs by friends of mine:

Aaron Draws Here:
http://aaronflorian.blogspot.com
My friend Aaron is a person with actual talent! Go check out his blog to see much better art than mine!

Faded80:
http://faded80.blogspot.com
My friend Derek has a blog up featuring his favourite musical selections. He has excellent musical taste and always finds the most interesting old records. I think most of the selections are from his local library's immense stash, so there should always be something amazing to listen to here.