This past semester I feel like I’ve really grown as an artist and challenged myself in ways I don’t normally. I remember being terrified to be taking a studio Drawing course, I’ve never taken a strictly drawing course before this. I was worried that I wouldn’t know enough or would know the “wrong” things when it came to drawing. Everything I knew about art and drawing had been things that I taught myself. Sure I could draw a hand, and sometimes even draw it well, but I didn’t know the names of specific techniques, or how to exactly draw what I saw, not what I think I know.
But as nervous as I was about that, I also felt excited to finally learn those things in an educational setting. I think I did pretty well in teaching myself, but I can only learn so much on my own. You don’t know what you don’t know and all that.
And now I am so, so happy to have taken this class. I really feel like I’ve improved in a lot of areas overall. Even if the entire class was built around still life’s and I still hate still life’s with a passion, I honestly hated them a little less during this class.
Here’s the first drawing I made in this course:
And the last:
I’m pretty happy with the improvement I can see here. I still have things to work on and can see new areas to improve upon, but I’d say this is the most progress I’ve made in a long while. For the last assignment I especially wanted to push myself. If you’ve seen any of my art in the past you can probably tell I’m partial to semi-realism or realism. I don’t really do anything abstract ever. But I really wanted to try it out for this piece. I used charcoal and white chalk, two mediums that are super malleable. It made me less stressed about trying something new because I could just erase and start again.
Which I did, many, many, many times. But, surprisingly, not for the background. I think I re-drew the bust’s jaw and eyes every single time I came to class to work on this. It’s been months since I’ve drawn a face. I’ve been working on a triptych since January that purposely shows 0 human faces. So I was a bit out of practice. Here’s what the drawing looked like on the very first day we started this:
I was really struggling to get any sort of accurate anatomy there. It’s not a bad first step by any means, but it was a struggle to even get that down on paper at all.
I’m super happy with the progress I made in Drawing I. I’m excited to see what progress I make next year.
Moving on to my other studio course, Painting. I hate painting.
I love looking at paintings, they are my favorite mediums to purchase and look at. I hate physically painting. It’s too messy and I really just don’t understand why oil paints and mediums are always so sticky. I felt like I was just always sticky whenever I was in this class.
It was not that I hated the course, I actually really enjoyed the prompts and projects in this class. But (I’m probably going to say this every paragraph, sorry in advance.) I hate painting.
Weirdly enough I wasn’t nervous at all for this class. I think most of my self-taught techniques came in handy here. I did digital art for a while and had a very painterly style, I would treat my digital canvases like oil paintings.
Here’s a piece I made back in 2023 for example:
I had felt most confident going into this class than any other. We also started this course with a still life, but I didn’t mind as much. There was a piece of fabric that I really wanted to paint, I love painting and drawing fabric. I felt pretty excited for the first painting and I think it came out really well.
But compared to the final painting:
I don’t see as much improvement. I think they’re both decent paintings but I don’t think I fully utilized this course to gain a deeper understanding of techniques to improve. I did get faster at painting however. The first painting took me about ~30 ish hours, in between waiting for the paint to dry and me just not knowing how to proceed. The last painting only took me about 10-15ish hours. And that’s a win in and of itself! Getting faster and not losing quality is always a form of improvement.
But in the conclusion of this semester, I’ve definitely noticed a lot of improvement. I can’t wait for next semester and all the studio courses I’ll take! I hope everyone’s finals went well and weren’t too, too stressful.
Below is just about every other drawing and painting I made in class, in chronological order, from this semester.
