Yesterday was the first day of my “Keeping a Sketchbook”class for Sydney Community College. It is quite a small class, so that looks very promising for a lot of personal attention. For the first lesson we were in the classroom, though from now on, each lesson will be out and about, starting with the Royal Botanic Gardens next week. Because it was the only time I will have my car with me, I took a lot of stuff. Danny Gregory’s book, The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be The Artist You Truly Are
I took ALL my sketching materials, pretty much (that’s a lot) and explained & demonstrated them. We did a blind contour drawing of our coffee mugs with excellent results. All the coffee mugs were different shapes, and the drawings reflected that. Then we did a study of whatever we’d brought for morning tea – mine was a blueberry muffin, which I did very quickly so that I could go around the class. I think the students would have been happy with their results because I was.
It was a very hot morning, so after far too much talking from me, we went to a little park across the road to sketch a tree (using the Julia and Catherine method of concentrating on the patterns in the bark and not trying to draw the whole tree, and being inventive with colour rather than realistic.) My tree was washed in a blue-grey on the basis that cool colours recede and I wanted to place the tree well behind the muffin. Then I dropped some warm colours on the front and some blues and purples at the sides and in any dips. I quickly did the simple heading to demonstrate how I went about it.
Next week at the Gardens, hopefully it will be fine, but if not we’ll be in the Tropical Centre. I’ll have less opportunity to talk, but we will be addressing composition & collage, and more ways to deal with the inner critic. It’s not too late to join the class.
