what i learned wednesday (the thursday edition)

Drawing Class - Week 2 (Mass Gesture), originally uploaded by faerytreecreations.

yesterday was just a loooooooooong day, but the conference was very interesting! it consisted of several workshops on the revitalization of maine's downtowns and the creative economy. i'm thankful that the conference wasn't happening today - we've had nonstop gale winds and downpours all day (and the conference was being held in several different locations from one end of waterville to the other - all of which you had to walk to). and today i'm having blogger issues...first the homepage wouldn't load, then when i finally got it to load, i couldn't upload pictures! so i'm doing this through flickr and hopefully it won't give me any trouble when i try to post it, then go back and fix it in blogger.

anyway...enough about that and on to the good stuff!

tuesday night's class was ah-mazing and the hour and a half FLEW by! we started the evening off with experimentation - using all of our tools, getting the feel for them, not drawing anything concrete, just making loose lines and seeing what the different charcoals and conte crayons and china markers would do. this was fun...and very messy! i loved it! there are 3 older women in my class who can't bear the mess that we make. they said that they are bringing gloves to the next class...i wanted to say get over it, but...to each their own! the teacher, helene, told us during the first class, "expect to get messy and don't wear good clothes". they obviously weren't listening.

(did i happen to mention that my teacher is of the "go hardcore or go home" school of thought? she wants no little drawings in her class - no small sketch pads. all work is to be done on the 18 x 24 sketch pad and should take up as much of the page as possible! needless to say, scanning these is next to impossible - so i'm taking pictures of them)

after "experimentation", helene set up a still life in the middle of the room with wine bottles, beer bottles, a tea cup, a vase, a light bulb and a jar of glue. as she did this, she talked about "mass-gesture" - about how it depicts volume and a sense of movement. she told us to move our hand as if we were touching the objects in the still life, to move our hands in a round/oval direction and to use a soft tipped charcoal.

she wanted us to really look at the still life as we drew and barely glance at what we were drawing, as "what" we were drawing wasn't as important as "how" we were drawing. she stressed paying attention to our subject, noticing the relationship between each object. we were to loosen up, draw life size or larger and relax.

she wanted a loose circular motion to be revealed in what we drew and no lines...we could blend with a fingers and give the object a little shape, but absolutely no lines - it all had to be circular motion!

i still need to learn to relax and pay more attention to the subject, but i really had fun with this!

next week's homework: to practice this technique by drawing 5 items of any shape on a table.

so much fun!! i love it!

i hope everyone is having a wonderful week so far! the weekend is almost here and i've got projects galore on the go - a ton of fairies, a fairy house, 2 bonnets and some lap quilts, plus my drawing class homework and not to mention building a doll house (but the dollhouse story will be for another post - maybe when i actually get it started). i swear every weekend from now till christmas will be packed with things to do - but that will be good, because these are fun things!