After three classes, I finally have something positive to say about my drawing course at Emily Carr.  The first two classes in this very short course (only 6 classes total) were a major disappointment.  The instructor is very talented and I’m sure he’s a fine teacher for the full time art school kids, but when it comes to drawing fundamentals (the name of the course, btw), he’s been less than stellar.

We’ve spent a good third of our class time introducing ourselves, then showing our work and talking about it.  For my ADD-adled brain, this is pure torture.  I want to learn!  I want to DO!  Spending 30 minutes talking about “What is a line?” makes me want to rip my hair out.

The course is basically led by the students and the instructor teaches by just answering our questions.  That might be good for advanced students who know what they’re doing and have specific questions about shading, perspective etc., but when you’re just starting out?  Most of the class doesn’t have any clue what to ask other than “So, how do we draw?”

The third class he redeemed himself though; we did an entire class on the human body.  He demonstrated the rules of splitting the body into eighths, we had a skeleton there to help us really visualize the body from the inside out plus we got to sketch from a live model – a nude live model.  I’m hardly a prude and quickly lost my self-consciousness at the whole situation, but it was a little startling right off the bat.  I caught myself a few times thinking about the fact that I was staring (I mean really STARING) at a naked woman’s butt.  No wonder so many people practice sketching with bowls of fruit!

Nudity aside, the class was enormously helpful for learning how to draw all sorts of different poses.  At one point the instructor got the model to stand up against the wall in front of a slide projector so he could project an image of a skeleton over her body.  Like an x-ray, it was a great learning experience to really see what’s going on inside our bodies.  By working from the inside out, I should (in theory) always be able to draw the human body in anatomically correct poses and positions.

It’s funny…as often as I draw and paint people, there are so many things I had simply never noticed by attempting to draw from memory.  Hands, for example; people constantly draw hands that are too small and make the entire picture look off.  Try this: hold your hand up in front of your face.  For the average person, their hand is the same size as their face.  That seems HUGE to me!  I think about all of the girls I paint and how BIG their faces are…never would I think to make their hands the same size.  Feet too – much bigger than you’d expect until you really start to LOOK.

Seeing where the shoulder joints are, where the hip joints are…all of those sort of angles now make sense when I’m sketching.  I don’t have to worry about if the position of my figure looks awkward or not because I’m not drawing it from the outside, from the skin; I’m now thinking about the skeleton and how the body really works.

It (almost) makes the first two classes worth it!

I drew this little flying girl last night using the new watercolor pencils (not crayons) and am thrilled with the way she turned out.  It’s so much easier to get in and work on the details with the pencils.  I’m wishing I had a few more colors though, like a brighter pink, a nice copper and maybe a brilliant purple.  Ah the never ending world of art supplies!

Her dress is left plain because next week I’m going to be learning how to collage paper dresses.  She looked too sad with a vacant white body, so I had to at least scribble in a bit of color.  Can’t wait to dig through my paper stash and pick out a new dress for her!

Three cheers for colour! I’m so excited to be bringing my girls to life, first with the shading and now moving on to shading with color, but I’m finding it a little more difficult than I was expecting. I started off using some “Caran D’Ache neocolor II Aquarelle” watercolor crayons that I’ve had kicking around for years. I can’t even remember where or from whom I got them. I shaved & shaved with a box cutter , but had a really tough time getting them to a sharp enough point so I could do any small detail work. The big white crayon was great for blending though, as was the blender pencil that came in a sketching kit my stepson got a few months ago. Yay for finding art supplies around the house! Cuz my budget is tight with a capital T this month. This is my first try on paper:

After adding a bit of water, seeing the page get wavy, then seeing my black pencil lines get smudgier & smudgier (especially into the white of the eyes, which never fully recovered) I was starting to get frustrated. I tried to go over all of my lines with an ultrafine point black Sharpie. This worked well in spots, then got caked with wax & would stop working. Wipe it off…scribble scribble…try again. SLOW GOING. It worked out in the end, but I had to really scrape hard and when you’re working on paper? Just not a good idea.

I was convinced I needed to get the real watercolor pencils, plus some good non-watercolor pencil crayons & picked those up today. I went for a walk with the boys and they wanted to pop into the comic book store. Since I had the dogs with me, I had to wait outside and what did I see 3 doors down? That I’d somehow never noticed before only a few blocks away from my house? A little art supply shop! I love supporting independent businesses and the owner was a sweetheart. They welcomed me inside (yes, even the dogs!), then charged me only $1 for a couple of pencils, a little more for the rest ($1.50?). I’ll definitely be going back there when I’m in a pinch.

Can’t wait to do some more practice sketches on paper and then – on wood!

I’ve been adding blog posts over at Ning instead of posting here, but since the majority of what I’m working on right now has to do with the Suzi Blu workshop, I better start posting or it’ll be a good long while before we get a proper Cagey Bee update!

My girl sketches have grown leaps & bounds since we started adding shading. I love how Suzi shows us exactly what she does to give her girls depth. It’s not a lot, just a little around the eyes and along the jawline into the cheek, but wow! They don’t look like flat, lifeless little girls anymore! Yay!!!

As I keep practicing different faces, hairstyles and gestures, I find myself running out of ideas, drawing a complete blank. I flipped through a bunch of fashion magazines the other day and cut out models with cool hair or interesting dresses that would work for my sketches. Maybe I’ll glue them right in my sketchbook so I can always flip back quickly when I run out of ideas.

That’s me, KGB! Working on my homework for Suzi Blu’s awesome workshop. It’s only the first week, but we’ve already had a couple of videos and PDF files, plus a bunch of homework. All of the course content has been really well done; Suzi did a fantastic job! If you want to learn how to draw pretty girls, this is the class for you.

I love that we’re getting right down to it, practicing faces and eyes and poses rather than going through all of the rules of drawing, perspective and so on. Instead of learning tons of theory and then trying to figure out how to apply that knowledge to the subject matter you want to draw or paint, we’re starting right from drawing what WE want to draw – pretty girls. hehe

I uploaded some of my homework sketches to my Flickr, as well as the Flickr group for the class. Feel free to add me as a contact and as your Ning friend too!