Drawing Class Week 3

Another week, another visit to the one room schoolhouse, as one of my college professors once put it.   He was referring to the old days, when small towns often had a single one room school house and one teacher who had the job of teaching everybody, with all the different ages and grade levels.  Montclair's grad program had moved this way decades ago, so as a grad student painter in oils, I worked along side freshmen using acrylics and people at more advance experience levels than I was at.  When I joined the printmaking class, I was there to learn woodcut, but I also did an etching diptych, and got to see people doing silkscreen, types of collograph, learned about how viscosity could be used, a very busy school room.  A lot of colleges have gone this way now, paying one professor to teach 3 or 4 different simultaneous classes instead of paying 3 or 4 professors.  So when I proposed my drawing class, I mentioned the possibility of teaching multiple levels at once.  Multiple higher levels will be able to work from the same still life set up, just with different materials and focus.

Meanwhile, I have a beginner class and an intermediate class, so I have to set up two still life subjects and move back and forth.  Following the same schedule used in July (and based on the college level drawing class I have taught), week 3 is a lesson in perspective, so after a quick lesson in two point perspective, I tell them to ignore it, and just draw what they see, using proportions, contour lines, negative spaces, and other stuff we have done. So I set up boxes for straight line exercises and paint cans for ellipse exercises.  My one advanced student has been working with charcoal, and had told me she will be on vacation next week so this is her last day of class, and so I got out one of the subjects I typically use with students at the end of drawing- a mannequin torso that I retrieved from my parents' house yesterday.

As I pointed out several weeks ago, if you can figure out how to draw a shoe, you can figure out how to draw a foot.  And if you can do that, the rest of a body is easy.  And this student did the shoes several weeks ago.   No real experience with figure art, but her mannequin torso turned out pretty good, no surprise to me. She would like to do more drawing classes, but she will be away next week, and the building is too busy over the next few months to schedule more right away.  Told her to keep an eye on the website and wait for details.