More Art to Ignore the Snow

I've signed up for another class at A6, a three-week class on drawing.  It's not the traditional drawing class since everyone has taken that years ago and in fact a number of the 22 students enrolled have art degrees, some have have MFAs.  I refuse to be intimidated.  Pat Clark is our instructor who is also the founder of the A6 gallery.  She is also the former department head of the art department at Long Beach State which is now a School of the Arts, as in Dr Patricia Clark.  I am sooooooo lucky!

We have classroom instruction and lecture followed by studio time beginning last Saturday and for the following two Saturdays.  In between Saturdays Pat has set aside two open-study periods where we can meet with her for assistance if we want.  I want!  Saturday's class began with us each selecting one print out of a group of five.  I chose the above interior scene.

Our next instruction was to put a sheet of tracing paper on top and outline anything we could see.  This is what I could see.

We set those aside and queued up to one of the five stations placed around the studio.  We had ten pieces of paper and started with blind contour drawings, one page for each station.  In a contour drawing you never lift your pencil, and this means you sketch by only looking at the subject and never at your paper - without lifting your pencil.  I added the watercolor today but this was my blind sketch of a rangy plant.

The next exercise was contour drawing looking at the subject.  I haven't done this in 35 years and back then I cannot tell you how stressed I was.  This time I had a blast, we all did.  The subject of one station was a down jacket all wadded up.  That was crazy.

The final part of the exercise on Saturday was to superimpose the traced image on top of one of our 10 drawings.  This is what I took to Pat last night for my open-studio session.  We were a small group so I got a lot of personal attention.  She liked this and wants me to paint it with watercolors.

I fooled around with watercolor pencils today and for the life of don't see the attraction.  First you have to apply the color by pencil and then you have to go back with a wet brush and smear it all together.  You have to do everything twice -what a pain.  I won't be doing this for my project.

I have this palette of watercolor paints that's probably ten years old but they're still good and I'm glad I didn't give up and throw them away in the move.  Lots of stuff got tossed.

Last night Pat had me trace my drawing in grease pencil so I could superimpose it on my wood block.

This is my woodblock, or as much of it as I was able to carve last night.  We pulled three proofs using a mustard gold and now I have to finish carving the rest of the block.  I am meeting Pat at A6 on Friday at 1:00 to print my woodblock in black on top of my watercolor piece.  Everything about this is new and exciting. The lectures are rich and challenging and this is just the first of three weeks.  On the break I ran out and signed up for the second part of this which will be in May.  And in case you're wondering, yes, this is expensive.  But I rationalize that since my credit card is filling up with medical bills, why shouldn't I put something on it that makes my world go round.