I want to emphasize that for a moment because being self-taught for so long made it easy for me to think taking a beginning level class might be redundant, boring and less than useful. That wasn't the case at all for the information presented in class. It was mostly just the nature of the teacher's assignments to be tedious and sometimes redundant within themselves that annoyed me and my own cursed perfectionism that stressed me out. I'm going to give Beginning Painting a try with a different (and hopefully more reasonable) teacher in the spring before I decide if I'll continue working toward an art minor.
I'll start with my midterm assignment since nothing before it was all that interesting in comparison. We had to set up "a complicated still life" in our dorm rooms to draw, 18" x 24", in charcoal. Other requirements included something about repetition of shapes and a line inset drawing that I'm not thrilled about/is not really my style so go ahead and ignore that part.
I don't normally keep a lot of stuff at school that isn't needed, but luckily I had a chance to go home right before the set ups were due and brought a box full of interesting-to-draw-type objects back. The things that made it into the final composition are a wooden box, a couple pewter knights, a pewter cup I bought in Ireland, a chess set, some horse bits and a Hawaiian sarong.
It ended up a lot more detailed than I'd originally intended, so you could say that, for this assignment at least, much of the insanity was self-inflicted.
After that I was burned out for a while and not at all interested in more long, tedious drawing assignments. Especially not another still life. I hate drawing still lifes in general but still lifes of fruit in particular....I think this drawing from early in the semester when I had to draw a bunch of pears expresses my feelings on that subject well enough.
But back to the pineapples. We had until they rotted to finish drawing them using a technical pen. If we stippled the whole thing (dot after dot after dot without ever using a line), we could cut the paper in half. I was all for making it the smallest I could and finishing as quickly as possible after that midterm assignment so that's the option I took. There are two pineapples in it: the leaves belong to a closer one, while the pineapple behind was sitting on a block that raised it higher.
I don't care for it too much personally, partially because my mind wasn't really in it, partly because ink doesn't have the same "life" for me as things that are meant to smear do. But my teacher loved it. She said I could sell it. I asked if she wanted to buy it. That didn't work.
Several assignments later came the final project: a series of two or three drawings (adding up to a certain size) that could be either still life or landscape. I preferred the latter, I just needed to decide what to draw.
I'd also been taking a skateboarding class this semester for a P.E. credit. Through that, the local skate park has become one of my favorite places in the world. I decided it was the most likely place to have interesting shapes to draw for my project.
In typical Pacific Northwest style, it rained all week. Small inconvenience to me when the alternative is a still life. Armed with a camera, an umbrella and a pad of cheap paper, I set about finding three places I wanted to draw from then went to work sketching as much as I could before a sudden downpour forced me to pack up and move under cover.
The whole experience was a very relaxing way to start off my finals week. The park was quiet and for most of the time I was there it only rained lightly off and on. At one point a man came walking down the path in the picture above, talking on a cell phone. It was one of those moments I really wished I could know what he was thinking as he watched me, sitting alone that rainy morning on wet pavement in a skate park, while what I was doing was completely hidden from his view by the umbrella.
Back on campus, I transferred my sketches to good paper and finished one a day in charcoal, referencing photos I'd taken at the park as needed.
This was the first project since the midterm that I was really excited about, and more specifically it was the only assignment I was excited about drawing, since my enthusiasm about the midterm was more about how well it turned out once I'd finally finished it. One downside is that I still can't stop seeing wet pavement everywhere I go.
