Last Class of Summer

The last class of the summer we went to the National Botanical Garden and did our sketching. I started with a charcoal pencil for a while.


Then I switched back to Pen for these.


I used white charcoal pencil for highlites.

Getting a Little Class

As I mentioned I am taking a beginning drawing class at the Smithsonian. My instructor is Trinka Margua Simon, and she is excellent. The class is 8 weeks, meeting once a week, and each week deals with some aspect of drawing and each week uses a different medium. Week one was learning to see flat and place objects on our work surface in the same relative location and size that we see them. The medium was pencil. The technique was to place three of the still life objects at the most extreme positions of our vision at the very edges of our paper – did I say this is a large piece of paper? – and then add additional objects in between. We were told to measure and take care in placement and sizing of the objects. This is my result.


After the exercise Trinka told us that we would never use those techniques again. These were very technical approaches to puting objects in our drawings that would probably never fit our vision.

The next week, day 2, of the class we worked with Charcoal. I have not worked with Charcoal before so this was going to be new and wondrous. This weeks topic was volume. Learning to give shapes in our drawings a three dimensional appearance. I learned a great deal about Charcoal in the short 2 and a half hours we had. I definitely have a greater understanding and appreciation for the medium. I found out that you can only put so much Charcoal on the paper and then it will just fall off. I also found out that the harder Charcoals will produce richer blacks but is more permanent – can’t be erased. I had always envisioned working with Charcoal as being very messy. It is, sort of. It is a lot easier to clean up than I would have thought. Anyway, this is my first Charcoal effort.

As you can see I managed to leave a lot of finger prints - I'll have to clean that up.