My Artwork, thus far

The Owl, now a senior in high school (I know! Can you believe it?!), is trying to get in all his volunteer hours to be eligible for Bright Futures. So several times a week, we go to the library, and he re-shelves books, or cuts out smiley faces for the children's area.

And since the Rhino is also trying out for the school's soccer team this year, we have to go right back to the school afterward.  So, for that hour and a half or so, I am held captive.

Stranded at the library, for an hour and a half, surrounded by all the lovely, lovely books. There are definitely worse ways to spend an afternoon. By the way, speaking of books, you know that September is National Literacy Month, right?

I spend my time at the library working on my artwork. This year, I finally took the plunge, and, as the kids have been urging me for years, enrolled in art classes at the local museum school.

We have had two nude models, which I thought would be a lot more distracting than it actually is--when you're sketching, you are so concerned with getting the lines and the contours and the motion of the bodies that you don't really get hung up on specific body parts. I did find that, at the very first model session with an extremely toned male model, I kinda sketched around certain parts of his anatomy, if you get what I mean, but I quickly realized this, laughed at myself and just got over it and went with the flow.

I don't want to shock any of your delicate sensibilities (I can hear some of you snorting over the internet at that), so first I'm going to show you this very tame, very safe work in progress.

As you can see (I hope), it's a sketch I'm working on of just simple cups, a sugar bowl, coffee maker and then there is a plate with a pear and berries I have yet to get to.

I say "simple," but I've been working on this piece for house to get the shading right in those cups. As you can see, I've only just plotted out the right of the sketch, and I'll fill in the details and shading as I go.  This work is part of my Foundations in Drawing class, which is run by Mason, who is very, very precise. Mason is concerned with realistic, accurate portrayals, which is something I really struggle over. I tend to go for people and want to get the expressions in their faces, the emotional connection, though I find that my work has been flat and cartoony to my own eyes, so this work with Mason is, I think, really helping me with that. We also worked on, the very first day of class, another tableau, but it was so full of different objects, including an inky black camera that I struggled to detail, that none of us in the class elected to to continue. Mason said he knew it would be difficult and was trying to gauge our strengths and weaknesses, and he has really helped me to be more precise with my lines.

Now, my next work is (prepare yourself. Gird your loins or something!) a male nude, and it's full-length, so I'm just putting a small version in case, you know, it bothers you. So, nothing is actual size. heh. Okay, this is from Georgi's class.

Georgi is very much about movement and expression. She has us do warm-ups, where we sketch the model in several different poses for only 30 seconds at a time, then a minute, then five minutes, and finally we get to the real work, where we spend maybe twenty minutes at a time on a single pose. It is amazing to me that, because of the warm-ups, twenty minutes seems really long, and I can actually get a lot done and sketch out a full figure in twenty minutes with, I feel, good quality! For me, at least.This is one of the twenty-minute poses (the other has the model reclining on his back).

So, what do you think? Remember, I am a rank amateur, and this is just my first two week's worth of work.

Be kind, please!