New class

A friend I met at SketchCon is always taking new classes, but she's not just a class junkie, she actually puts everything she learns to work, and as a result has discovered several exciting new ways to make art. I decided to follow her example and step outside of my comfort zone, so I signed up for an online class at Kara Bullock Art School (the physical school is in Orange County) with an artist named Deb Weiers.

I was intrigued by her technique of putting together drawing, painting, gesso, gel pens, collage, and apparently whatever other art supplies she has lying around, and coming up with something completely out of the ordinary. I have never done collage (except for some extremely puerile flowery mod-podged wooden plaques in my teenage years), so I'm a little wary, since her collage isn't finding things and incorporating them, it's making things and incorporating them.

Our warm-up exercise for the class, which started today, was to draw "wonky critters," whose purpose is to be photocopied, cut out, and used in "other work," which I am sensing will be in the other three modules of the class. She urged us to "just have fun," and then proceeded to draw some exceedingly wonky critters, all apparently from within her head (although she did say she looked at a photo for one of them).

I tried my best to be wonky, but since I do not have the physiognomy of these critters firmly in my brain, I looked at photos, and my addiction to verisimilitude occasionally got the best of me.

I drew with a Pentel EnerGel pen, which has liquid gel ink that is slightly water soluble, and then went in after with a wet paintbrush to use the ink to do some coloration and shading.

Here are my examples. The shih tzu, the donkey, and the jackrabbit probably have the most character. Well, and maybe the crow.

I may try this again tomorrow before moving on into the main lesson, to see if I can get a little less realistic and infuse a little more personality into my "characters." Looking at them all here, I see I have a ways to go.

Here, by comparison, are some of the teacher's:

But...this is fun so far!

EnerGel Pen in Bee sketchbook.