This semester I signed myself up for every single studio class I could possibly take in one day. I’m taking Painting II from 8:30-11:30, Figure Drawing I from 11:30-2:30, and finally Basic Drawing from 2:30-5:30. And while in theory it sounded amazing to take studio classes all day long, it is a little tiring in practice. But I really wanted to push myself for my last year here at Marywood, so why not! 

I noticed a significant increase in my artistic abilities from the two studio classes I took last semester, Painting I and Drawing I. So I’m really wanting and hopeful that I’ll see the same improvement this semester as well. 

Since it’s the first week, I don’t have too much to say about each class yet. In Painting II we jumped straight into a still life using a limited color palette: raw umber, yellow ochre, and venetian red. I love these colors together, anything with raw umber and I’m on board. 

In Figure Drawing I we are doing some skeleton studies, focusing mainly on the ribcage at the moment. It was definitely an adjustment to go straight from painting to using charcoal and I kept wanting to hold my charcoal how I held my paintbrush. After the first thirty minutes or so that habit died down thankfully.

My last class of the day, Basic Drawing, was by far the hardest for me. I severely underestimated how hard it would actually be to draw all day long. I’ve drawn for fifteen-twenty hours at a time before, but it was on the same drawing, not three separate drawings. We were doing, you guessed it, another still life. This one was a little different, since this is a fundamentals class that is primarily for freshmen, that I forgot to take when I was supposed to (oops), we were looking at a lot of planes and light/dark values. Thankfully I was allowed to use charcoal for this as well so I wouldn’t be switching between three mediums and three drawings all day long. I think this class will definitely be the hardest for me overall, just to mentally push through and draw more after already drawing all day long. 

But, I am super excited for this semester and to be making art all day, even if I go just a little insane from it. 

And here is the painting I was working on for my birthday that I finally finished one whole month after I said it would be done! 

I had to change my idea a tiny bit, I had brought all my nice oil paint to class and was left with Artist Loft Oils in my studio. I never really thought that oil paint could differ so much from brand to brand. But, wow. I am usually a massive Artist Loft brand fan, not this time. They were extremely watery and transparent, hard to work with, and I had to mix a bit of white into almost every color because of how transparent it was. I really wish I had just waited or grabbed my good oil paints from Marywood, but oh well, I think I made it work out decently in the end. 

I have two other drawings currently at different stages of production, I’m going to stop showing them before they’re done since I cannot stick to deadlines ever apparently. 

I hope everyone else is having a good first week back!