Next to last ...

Last night was our next to last class with Marilyn. Four people showed up. How very disappointing. I can't believe they're not getting anything out of this class - I don't understand why they weren't there. But, on the other hand, that made it better for those of us who were there. We had more and better interaction with Marilyn than we might have had otherwise.

Last night we worked on 'layout' and on 'form and texture'. I think that we could spend another couple of classes on what we did last night and still not cover all that we really need. But what we did do was really neat - making little thumbnails to decide how to render the subject - and then using shading and crosshatching to establish the difference between light and dark. I like the thumbnail idea - it's kind of like taking snapshots at various focal lengths with a camera. We used our fingers as viewfinders to establish the view and then took that to the thumbnail. And, just as in photography, get closer!! Closer is better.

I have been asked what I'm going to do next. Take more classes? Go into painting? Well, if I can find another class about DRAWING I might well take it, but it is more likely I will begin to work my way through the 138 lessons I have downloaded from drawspace.com. Brenda Hoddinott's site is a wealth of information about this skill and there's enough material on the site to last at least a year - doing two or more lessons a week. It could take longer if the pace is slower, and it may well be. The 'beginner' lessons are easy enough, but in looking ahead I see that there is some really complex stuff in the 'intermediate' and 'advanced' level lessons and two a week may be too ambitious.

This coming week we are to look into 'portraits'. I am going to use my photograph of Papacito (my father-in-law) as my subjuect. I am really looking forward to it.