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It seems for the remainder of the classes we are getting a choice of photocopies from which we are then to draw what is on them. I picked this severe looking woman.

We are practicing over and over the lessons of placement, perspective and shading. I'm glad there are only two or three more classes, I am starting to lose interest considering we are not learning anything new, but rather, are honing our skills.

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More practice of people parts. Very carefully measured and proportioned the skeletal foot. Was careless and did not bother with the four feet below it, and it shows.

I used my own hand as the model for these two. Drew the negative space first in the left one, made it much easier to do.

I'll be missing the next two classes because I will be in Australia.

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Lessons today:

A line drawn along the bottom edge of your eyes is exactly the midway between the top and bottom of your head - in a typically proportioned person, that is.

If you were to take five of your eyeballs and put them end to end across your face, your real ones would be numbers two and four, the numbers one, three and five represent the space between the sides of your head and the eye, and the space between your eyes.

So the first exercise was to copy a couple of photo copy pictures to get used to drawing a head. If it is hard to see because the pencil drawing isn't very dark, click on the image to make it bigger, it should be easier to see that way.

Then it was to draw a picture of a skull to get used to the structure underlying a head.

Next week we'll be drawing a skull with the muscles on top, to give further education about what underlies the skin on the head.

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Not much new was taught in today's art class - work more on charcoal skill set. Start by filling in the entire page and then use the malleable eraser to slowly remove the charcoal from the brightest spot of the subject, working one's way outwards from there.

The object in question is a moose's skull that our art teacher absconded from a provincial park. Behind it was a piece of wood that curled around the skull. I am not satisfied with it at all, I do not find it came out very well.

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Day 3:
Lesson 7: Negative Space
Lesson 8: Light source and shadows

This first one was the negative space exercise. Take the blue paint, now paint all of the negative space first. Then use the yellow paint and the blue paint together to mark the edges correctly, then use the yellow paint for the objects, and then finally mix in a bit of blue and yellow together to give it some shape.

Next was the light source and shadows, just give some more definition to the work we started last week.

I'm done with this, I don't want to work on it any longer. It is what it is.

The teenage girl showed up yet again, to my surprise.

I would say about two sevenths of the class had trouble wrapping their mind around the idea of negative space. I think my writing exploration of the inane helps me to understand such concepts with relative ease.

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Day 2
Lesson 5: Using Charcoal
Lesson 6: Placement

I was surprised that the teenage girl showed up again, but there she was. I got a compliment today at art class - a woman who is the only one that has done this art class before told me how impressed she was with what I've done so far, asking in a presumptuous way that I had done art previously.

Not really since high school.

proportions

The lessons are from 7-10PM and at around 9:25PM our instructor started with proportions.

Take a pencil, hold it straight out in front of you, hold it either vertically or horizontally, depending on what you are measuring
close one eye and put your thumb on the not sharp end of the pencil and look at what you are to be drawing
now drag your thumb down or along the edge of the pencil until the distance between the end of the pencil and your thumbnail measure what you are looking at
This is the base measure
Using the base measure, measure how many base measures it takes to span the perpendicular direction of the thing being drawn. Once you have that number, now you know the proportion to use.

The example we did was to put a wine bottle on a table. Using the pencil horizontally, measure the width of the wide part of the bottom, then turn the pencil vertically, keeping the thumb in the same spot on the pencil, and see how many of those equal measures it takes for the length of the bottle. We went around the class and most of us had a proportion of a little bit more than three - ie, the bottle is a little bit more than three times as tall as it is wide.

The next part of the instruction was to then draw the wine bottle, but to make it fill whatever space you had available on the paper. The idea is to use the proportions to gauge how large to draw the base in order to get the height of the bottle to fit nicely in the space available.

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Day 1
Lesson 1: Eye level line
Lesson 2: Vanishing Point
Lesson 3: Perspective
Lesson 4: Proportion

We are ten in the class in a fairly small room with just enough space. There is a grade 10 boy and a girl who looks to be about the same age - she didn't share anything to indicate how old she is. The rest of us are adults where I suspect I may be the youngest one. The grade 10 boy looks like he's going to stick it out, but the girl looked like she was really feeling out of place in a room full of adults.

So far so good for me, I have a larger list of supplies I will need to acquire.