Here is an insight into part of who I am – I currently draw like the kindergarteners I teach ha 😮 I have always drawn stick figures and blobs for animals. I often tell Nathan that I wish I could paint or draw better. For the month of January, I was on a mission to find adult art classes! This turns out to be pretty difficult. The college courses are only during the week at like noon which for a working person does not line up. And the other courses are aimed towards children mostly.

Today I went to an adult art class (intro to sketching) at a studio about 15 minutes from my apartment. It was a very interesting setup – I was the only one taking the free intro course today and there were other people (mostly adults with some high school aged kids) in this room working on easels. They were all doing something different and there are three instructors walking around the room giving advice or checking in.

For the intro class, I was watching the founder give his tips and strategies on an IPad. He told me the proper way to hold the charcoal pencil and smudging techniques. Then after an instructor checked in and made sure I wasn’t confused – the video continued to sketching still life. The first one was a vase and an apple. I’m posting my progression of three sketches below:

I am really proud of my final sketch 🙂 I thought I couldn’t draw at all and this is pretty good – you can see the defining lines of the vase and the shadow of apple a bit. The instructor said the vase could be rounder. There is a big focus on making the shapes line up with where they are in the real still life (lining up the bottoms and depth perception).

The instructor when I signed up for the first month of courses today said that the sketching focuses on making shapes rather lines – once you have mastered that, you can add shadows and more details. The cover photo for this post, and photo below, is the final still life we worked on (a fan, vase, bowl with onion, and a lemon). This one is trickier for sure but the focus was on the sketching and smudging and then finalizing details.