Friday at Art School

Friday is Painting and Sculpture day and this is the view from our studio in the morning. You can see ships.... w3rd! ;)



Our teacher Dallas introduced us to the basics of painting hardware (brushes, tins, paints, palettes) then took us a tour of the place where we will build our own frames and stretch the canvases over them. I heart staple guns so I'm very excited about that part.

We stapled the paper that they use for cutting out patterns onto drawing boards then drew on our subject with pastels. Actually, I drew mine on with charcoal because I wanted to do a tonal study rather than a colour one, but that was ok, I didn't get in trouble. In fact, the charcoal blended with the paint beautifully, giving definition... still, might go around the contours in artline marker.



I started by mixing a very dark grey (in one of those big spoons you get from the Chinese takeaway cos we had it the night before and I forgot a palette), then worked from the outside in from the blades and started building up some of the other features.


How the work looked at the end of class. Luckily for me we get to work on it next week.


Found this picture up the back of the classroom, going to find out who painted it because I really like their work. If they are not famous yet I would love to have this or something like this on the wall at Emerald Arts.


Sculpture class was on in the afternoon. We're going to learn how to carve fish shapes out of wood. Camphor Laurel I think it was called. I'm going to pick a simple(ish) shape then simplify it, both because I think it will be easier to make (never carved before... nor painted from life for that matter) and because the teacher showed us some amazing simplified forms by a Sculptor called Brancusi. I nabbed a book on him from the library before I went home and loved his work... even though the pictures are pretty rough, it's an old book. The interwebs helped with that though.


An ear... forgot to turn this photo around oops. Kind of like it this way, but it definitely works better the other way around :P

In the shop today I took out all my drawings from Thursday and sprayed them with fixative. Comparatively, I can see that the lower nose and eye are more realistic than the ones at the top. The remove that viewing a photo gives also makes me realise just how effective shading with compressed charcoal can be for effecting depth.

The boots you can see on my feet are called "24 Hour Boots". They're supposed to be so comfortable that you can wear them all day and all night, to bed if you want to. I can tell you right now that they really are that comfortable. I'm going to wear them every day I think because we do a lot of standing and we're required to wear enclosed footwear at all times on campus.


I can't even begin to tell you just how much I love being at Art School. It feels like I have finally found where I am supposed to be. I've only been there a week and already I feel like I've learned a thousand things and I haven't stopped drawing and reading and painting and learning learning learning.

So great.

-Emmeline