Drawing Class: Pastels

If you want to get into pastels, don’t buy the cheap $4 box from Dick Blick. It’s $4 for a reason. We worked with soft pastels (not oil), and my instructor recommended two brands: Rembrandt and Sennelier (the first soft pastels, supposedly). She works primarily in pastels, so she should know what she’s talking about. She passed around some for us to try and that Sennelier went on the paper like buttah. 

We were instructed to bring in a photo of a landscape or something like that to make use of color. I quickly went through my flickr archives and settled on this photo of tomatoes taken in the garden of the French Laundry. It’s one of my favorite photos that I’ve taken, and the most beautiful compost pile I’ve ever seen. The drawing is more of an abstraction of the scene, and clearly just beyond a third grader’s ability level (the shading and highlights are all jacked…hey, there’s the critic again), but I like it! Maybe I’ll even frame it.

Drawing Class: Pencil Composition

Last night, I had my last of four drawing classes through Minneapolis Community Ed. It was something I decided to do on a whim and really glad that I did. I hadn’t taken an art class since middle school. It was good to try something out of my comfort zone. The class was really small, less than 10 people, and filled with other people like me who were testing the waters of drawing. I think that over half of the class was involved in teaching or education in some way. I wondered, who are the type of people who take Community Ed classes? Multitalented people with unexplored interests? People with fleeting thoughts of a creative career that were left on the playground?

One of the things I noticed that almost all of us had in common was a very loud inner critic. There was fussing and complaining. One guy kept hemming and hawing during each exercise, and the instructor would have to tell him “The time has started on the quick draw! Get started!” One week, I was growing tired of the fussing (and really hungry) and joked aloud, “This class is really good at helping people get over being perfectionists!” I judged from the awkward silence that that probably seemed to hit too close to home for people, so I added, “And I am totally saying that as someone who struggles with it!” Oops, there’s that passive aggressiveness. 

Anyway, I’m going to post some of my sketches from the last month. This is from the first night when we focused on pencil drawing. It’s my first sketch ever! Well, there are some lousy ones in my journal, but those don’t count. It was a 2 minute quick draw exercise, and I was really pleased at drawing something that actually resembles an apple. A few people said that it was their favorite of the group! This apple really made my day.