It’s been five weeks since my life-drawing class began. Though this evening class makes for a long day, especially after a full day of working, I look forward to it every week. My initial goal for this class was to learn to really see – to observe, and truthfully record that observation. While that goal hasn’t changed, I’ve discovered that the process of recording that observation needs refinement.
In my previous post, I wrote about falling in love with drawing with charcoal and how working with this tool affected my later drawings and etchings. I need to build new experiences, discover and play with new tools, and learn to use them properly. I can’t just rely on past habits and experiences since that is limiting.
In the past couple of classes, I’ve made a concerted effort to draw with a pencil. The results of weeks 4 and 5 are below:
I find that using a pencil for gesture drawings is challenging. Actually, I find any kind of drawing with a pencil challenging. Why? Here’s my list of reasons and challenges:
- Using line expressively is not necessarily difficult. It takes practice, and currently I haven’t had much of it.
- I have a habit of wanting to smudge the drawing, creating messy cross-hatchings that in effect negates line quality.
- Holding the pencil in a way that allows me to have a sensitive touch to the drawing surface is a technique I haven’t quite figured out.
- I have yet to learn to use a pencil properly. That is, keep the point sharp at all times, use the proper hardness value for the right task, and not smudge!
This short list of challenges is really not that difficult to overcome. As I’ve written before, all it really takes is practice.
Though I don’t feel I’m getting enough practice, these past five weeks of drawing have been more than what I’ve done in the last six years.
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