Drawing & Painting Class - Line, Shape & Form w/ Joel

My last acrylic painting class at Surrey Adult Learning Centre was a success but the next class was cancelled due to low enrollment; so instead I took Drawing & Painting with the same instructor, Joel Wareing. This class turned out to be better suited to my needs because we had a lot more instruction on drawing. The first three sessions were dedicated to Line, Shape and Form.

In the first lesson, we did self-portraits concentrating on drawing lines combined with using the cross hatching technique. Mine came out much better than expected and even though I wasn’t originally interested in portraiture, it might suit me. I didn’t come out looking like a great beauty but the portrait closely resembled me. Now I know why self-portraits often look so sombre… it’s because the artist is trying to draw and concentrate.

For the second assignment we looked at breaking down objects into their basic shapes; we had multiple still life set ups to choose from. Still life drawing is very difficult for me. I can’t see a good composition and have a hard time fitting everything on a page when I do.

After class I did a few drawings at home; you would think it gets easier over time, but I didn’t find that. This one was the best out of about four...

Form was our topic for the third class and again we had still life settings to choose from. Form as described in ‘Draw like the Masters’ by Barrington Barber is “work to show us that two-dimensional marks can be read as three-dimensional things occupying space”. We used charcoal for the background and an eraser to build form, this was easier than drawing with graphite on white paper. Of course I had trouble with composition, but this time drawing a violin was fun. It’s such an awesome shape but very hard to draw; I would love to have a violin to observe and draw at home.