Art classes and extreme craft miscellany - Why Am I Making This? Issue 9
Hello friends!
It’s nearly the end of February, which means it’s time for another newsletter. It’s Julien writing to you, your Maine-based artist friend.
I have been shockingly busy with some online art classes I’ve been doing, which means that to procrastinate on my academic homework, I have been doing an exceptionally random assortment of crafts in my free time. If you’re not interested in my musings about art instruction and just want to see photos of the ceramics, paintings, polymer clay figurines, and plushies I’ve been making, feel free to skip the first section of this newsletter.
Classes
Towards the end of January, I was feeling pretty lackluster on a day-to-day basis because of the great quantities of nothing going on in my life. I thought it might help fill my time to do some online classes, so I signed up for two continuing education classes at SVA (The School of Visual Arts) in New York. I have long admired their extensive continuing education offerings, and was curious to finally be able to partake myself. (They never used to offer remote classes, as far as I’m aware.)
The first class is called “A Crash Course in Illustration” with Tristan Elwell, and covers fundamentals like perspective, the structure of the human body, drawing fabric, tone and value, color, and composition. It has mostly been lecture and critique based, and the homeworks I’ve done are nothing too exciting (just a few perspective exercises and very fast figure drawings):
I’m picking up a lot of little tips, and I’m really hopeful that it’ll help me learn to think about drawing better.
The second class is called “Caricature Boot Camp” with Steve Brodner, and is pretty much a portrait life drawing class. But also so much more than that! I have never done an actual taught drawing-from-life class, and the experience is surprisingly rich compared to the casual drop-in life drawing I have done occasionally over the past couple years.
The portrait model poses anywhere from 30 seconds (where we might do a “blind contour” drawing, without looking at our paper) to 20 minutes. You get to know the model’s face very well after drawing it from many angles over the course of two hours or so, and Steve’s prompts for how to approach each pose have given me a lot of new ways to think about starting a drawing.
Here’s a number of blind contour drawings (I usually cheat and glance at the paper a handful of times):
These have really surprised me. I never, ever thought I would be able to draw such lively, cartoonish faces so quickly and freely. Before this class, I had never tried!
Here is an “s-curve” drawing, where the whole face is comprised of disconnected curved lines, giving the drawing a somewhat lyrical quality:
Some “shadow hunts”, where we focus on the shapes that light and shadow create on the face:
And one finished painting I did of one of the models as homework:
This painting is probably no better than portraits I’ve done in the past, but I was able to approach it more freely and loosely than previous portraits I’ve painted, which made it a less stressful, more freewheeling experience. I’m excited to see what else I learn.
I will say, though, that I was not prepared to be busy for most of the evening after work two days a week. I almost had a little crisis the second week of class, thinking about needing to do homework and how much time I was spending in class, when I was used to the general feeling of nothing happening most days. (But that's what I wanted, isn't it??)
I think I’m over it now, but like I said in the intro, having art “obligations” set me off doing lots and lots of random other things. Even more so than usual.
Also, this small experience has made me feel like it’s probably good I didn’t do much graded art instruction when I was still in school - I wonder whether doing these kinds of classes in a more high-pressure environment would have put me off art altogether. I guess I’ll never know!
Let’s have a look at some of the things I procrastinated with.
Sewing
At the beginning of February I engaged in a little retail therapy via purchasing a bunch of new Pokémon plushies. I was pretty obsessed with them for a week or two (and they are still bringing me great joy at my computer desk), and they inspired me to try making my own plushie, a blue tiger-mouse-beaver with a leaf on its head. I sewed it by hand in one weekend while binging The Expanse.
I have a feeling I’m going to come back to plushie-making soon (probably as soon as I buy a sewing machine). I have something of a history of making plushies (I made this big Toothless back in 2012), and would love to be a little better at it.
Sculpey
Perhaps because of the plushies, I was thinking more about making little animal models like I did back in August. I had been looking at kness’ little ceramic animals a lot, but felt like it might be too much hassle to make ceramic figurines, bring them to the community studio for firing, wait for them to be done, pick them up, glaze them, get them fired again... so I thought I’d make a figure out of polymer clay.
I made one of my favorite Pokémon, Meganium, to go with one of my plushies! It was magically fast to sculpt it and bake it in one afternoon, and with sanding, these little figurines can get really smooth and pleasing to hold.
Ceramics
However... a few days after making some other Sculpey things (that didn’t turn out as beautiful as Meganium), I was chatting with a coworker about her interest in pottery, and thought maybe it actually wouldn’t be so hard to work with clay again.
I had several spoon rests that had been sitting, glazed but unfired, in a box since September, and I thought I would paint a few new ones as well before bringing them all to the community studio kiln for glaze firing:
The old and newly-painted dishes mostly came out pretty nice after firing! A few bubbles and imperfections, but overall I was excited about them.
I also got started making some new figurines and little dishes out of new clay!! Excited to be back on the clay train.
Drawing & Painting
I did one quick digital drawing in the middle of the month for a friend, as a Valentine’s Day gift from her to her wife. Aww! I really felt like I was able to draw their faces with more ease after my practice in caricature class.
Later in the month I bought some acrylic gouache in a sale, and painted a sketch that I did way back last July. Really excited about how it came out, honestly.
I liked it so much that I did the painting I showed above, for my caricature class, in acrylic gouache too!
I have a lot of ideas for more illustrative gouache paintings... we’ll just have to see whether I do them.
With all this going on, and my life still busy with classes for the next two months, who knows what miscellaneous art activities the next newsletter will bring??
Thank you, as ever, for reading. As ever, I would love to hear your thoughts, questions, or suggestions. <3
Julien