I spent an unexpectedly cold week at the John C. Campbell Folk School in March while taking a class in Composing Dynamic Watercolors. Taught by instructor Annie Pais and assistant Suzy Deslauriers. We had hoped to be able to do some plien air painting around campus capturing spring unfolding, but it was too cold for that. Instead we stayed in the studio, painting still life compositions or from photos. Working in the studio all week had advantages. We had group exercises and provide were able to provide feedback to each other while actively painting. I really enjoyed the social interactions and watching everyones paintings come to life around me.
We started our class with some drawing exercises. We did several blind contour sketches of each other while sitting in our discussion circle. This turned out to be a lot of fun, both to do and to share. Sometimes the images look more like a Picasso, then the person we were drawing. Mine exhibited disembodied heads and disjointed faces, but the drawings still contained aspects of the people I was drawing.
Then we moved on to do some blind contour, contour and thumbnail sketches of objects around the studio.
We arranged several objects then used a view finder to help us select the composition to use for our thumbnail sketches.
 |
 |
 |
| Blind contour |
Contour |
Thumbnail sketch |
No comments:
Post a Comment