Learning to Draw...
This page documents my experience taking the Dartmouth SART 15 (Drawing I) course. I’m taking the course with basically no prior drawing experience whatsoever, and I’ve been enjoying it a lot. You can find all the pieces I’ve produced for the course below along with short assignment descriptions and reflections for each piece.
Week 1: Learning the Basics of Shading
This was the first assignment we did. I think we had about a day and a half for it. We had two references to look at. The first was a sphere the prof drew, and the second was a printed sheet of paper with a sphere on it he distributed. The image had quite a low quality, so I mostly looked at his drawing. This was my third attempt at a sphere. I’m quite happy with how the dark regions turned out. The three main points of improvement are the transition from dark to light, the need to increase the highlight at the top left, and the fact that I initially did the ground shadow rounded because it felt intuitive and had to flatten it by drawing straight horizontal lines over it after.
Week 2: Still Life Observation
Set Up
Please feel free to check the actual set up above (It is in a spoiler-like tag so as to save space. Click on *Set Up& to expand it.) Our second assignment was all about practicing the skills we have been learning for the past two weeks (lines, shadows, etc.) and learning to draw from life instead of from a 2D picture reference. I am quite pleased with how it turned out although it took a few attempts to get past my wrong intuitive understanding of geometry (not a single perspective lesson at this point, I sat lower than the viewer from the picture of the set up). The prof also liked it and his one suggestion was about darkening stuff and associating darkness with shadow rather than with what color a certain part of the composition actually is.
Week 3: Still Life Composition Design
Set Up for Original Composition
For this piece we had to pick 2 objects from the set up above and construct an original composition inspired by them. In addition, we had to fill the whole paper and had to use charcoal and charcoal pastels but no pencils or graphite. I struggled a lot with this one because normal charcoal made some noise that was driving me crazy so I exclusively used the pastels. They were so messy but fun nonetheless. I also used tape to create that empty space in the middle which was intended to highlight the verticality of the piece. Unfortunately, it turned out you use tape on canvas, so it did tare a bit of the paper, but it doesn’t really show. I loved all the different textures I managed to create, and although I didn’t do the best job of recreating the tree crown my head-like looking version still looks somewhat good.
Weeks 4-5: Live Figures Sketching + M. C. Escher Inspired Piece
We had a pair of nude models in class during week 4. Unfortunately, the prof was sick, so we did not get a ton of feedback. I have never drawn human figures before haha. I think this one turned somewhat okay, because it is hard to tell where the errors are. I enjoyed working with a white pencil on black paper. We had about 10 minutes for each sketch, so this is why these aren’t particularly detailed. We did a lot of sketches in these 4 hours, but I’m only posting these because most of them are very low quality.
This was the first assignment we had 2 weeks for instead of the usual 1. The idea was that we connect it to perspective somehow and make it inspired by Escher’s style. I have settled on a more circular abstract piece but wanted to also make it somewhat naturalistic, hence the details on the sliced disk and the attempt at the pencil texture. I love that I at least partially managed to get the two pieces to go from light to dark and from dark to light and I think it is a nice piece if not too clever. I also love the background and it took very little time to do it unlike basically everything else in that drawing. The prof did suggest that I try and make the background completely black though, so I may try if I find myself with enough free time and motivation on my hands.
I also have a secondary Instagram account that is centered around my art and is somewhat more spammy than my main one. It is also public. You can follow it if you want by clicking here.