One More Drawing Class

Today was the final meeting of the first four week session of drawing at the JSAC.  This first session was the equivalent of the first month or so of my college basic drawing classes, so that means pencil line drawing, the basics of rendering a still life, one object and/or many.  In a college setting, where grading is part of the process, today would have been a graded project, a final line drawing that would have been collected and graded, where I would hope to see demonstration of ability to render individual objects, and being able to show a group of objects together, accounting for spacing and other relationships.  Accounting for multiple objects and these relationships can be challenging, as my students today discovered.  However, it is something they could do and by the end of class today, both had surprised themselves with what they had accomplished.  I would like to claim all the credit, but the reality is that I gave a basic assignment, pointed out things here and there that could be improved, offered occasional advice, and let them go to work.

Above we see the still life set up, an arrangement of objects from my extensive collection of such things, some of which were probably used in the college equivalent of this assignment.  Below is a better photo of a drawing of that still life, from the same point of view.

Today was yet another hot and humid day.  Yesterday Nichole had made the call to move the class up to room #3 again, same as last week.  The news this morning had said that the day would likely feel like 100 degrees, and it sure did.  In parts of the building that were not our air conditioned classroom the air felt very heavy and damp, and outside we had that plus brutal heat. That may have been to blame for low attendance- only two showed up today, one of whom was someone who had to miss last week, but she quickly caught up.

Besides today's drawing lesson, I was also trying to recruit people for the next round, which would start next week.   So I brought a nice assortment of student value drawings, since that is what comes next in the class.  Charcoal, ink wash, and conte crayon.  Charcoal is the most like pencil, so that is the logical choice to come next- one student already had some purchased.  But they admired the other media, and were particularly impressed with a chiaroscuro drawing not done in my class by left behind by a student who never reclaimed it.  I showed them my compromised variation, white paper with two varieties of conte crayon- one medium and one dark.  The effect is the same.  As I said, both seemed to like what they had done today and over the course of the class in general. There's only so much that can be taught in 10 hours, so it's a matter of showing them how to do something that they already can do but don't know yet.  But I can do that.  Will these two decide to see what they can accomplish with four more meetings?  I'll know by next week.