Homework Snippet

Roz Stendahl's class, "Drawing Practice: Drawing Live Subjects in Public" has helped learn quite a bit, so far this month. It's really stretched me and gotten me into the habit of drawing 30 minutes each and every day. While I think my basic ability to contour draw has improved with practice, there is still so much to learn. One of the basics that I've been trying to consistently execute since I started taking painting classes is to capture and represent values accurately. In drawing class, this has also been an emphasis.

With the drawing class, the emphasis has been on focusing on 4 gradations, dark, sort of dark, sort of light, and light. The more advanced folks in the class are able to do more.  For me, focusing on 4 levels is enough. I'm sure I'm not the only beginner who finds it hard to make the darks dark enough, the lights light enough and so on.  

Tonight something magical happened with one of my sketches for homework. I used watercolor in the color of Sepia and a water brush and did a rough sketch of a cat without drawing a contour first. I just went for it and made my darks super dark and so on. With this class the point is not to end up with a finished drawing, but rather to practice. Still, I am really please with how this turned out. The watercolor helped me stay out of the details and just show the values.