Art Class

I am supposed to meet my instructor at the classroom today for some one-on-one instruction. I am not sure what to expect. The guy is good - really good - but he does not have a photorealistic style and I'm not sure he could successfully pull one off.

His is a more commercial, down-home style - like my aunt's. There is nothing wrong with that and it certainly doesn't mean there's nothing he can teach me - of course there is - I just don't know what in the world he is going to teach me one-on-one. In a class setting, we focus on the basics, and I need those basics as I haven't seriously pursued drawing, or the visual Arts in any form, in several years. It's great to get those refreshers - it's like anything else you haven't done in a while - it just takes some memory-jogging and suddenly, the ideas start flowing.

But this guy never went to school for Art; he's self-taught. And I already know one thing over him: how to draw literally from observation. That's the single, most critical thing to visual arts: ignoring all of your preconceived notions about how something is "supposed" to look or work and simply drawing what you see in front of you.

Once you have mastered that and drawn enough stuff from observation, you can draw literally anything from imagination, because you don't just know how it should look, you know how to literally render it on paper. You can tell from this guy's work that he works almost solely from his imagination.

But, again, everyone has something to teach me and I want to learn, so maybe he'll be moving me into paints. I don't have much experience with paints of any kind and that's his field of choice, so I can definitely learn a lot from him in that arena.

And everyone is off, getting their stuff together and headed to WonderCon this weekend, anyway (if they aren't already there), so I don't expect much to go down while I'm gone. I'll be back later on.

© C Harris Lynn, 2009