Name: Tess
Home: St. Louis
Saturday Art
This charcoal drawing is of my neighbor, Francesca. I haven't used charcoal for years. So many that I couldn't put a date on when I last did it. Seven years ago? Eight? I used it all the time in college. It felt very awkward to do it again.
posted by Kaela | 10:30 AM
4 Comments:
You have such talent--and I am envious (in a healthy way, of course!)
I can't draw stick figures without making people laugh.
I look forward to Saturday Art at Arch Words!
Hh
Did you take classes for art?
Thank you, Hh, for the nice words!
Ben, I did go to school for art. That sounds fancy and grand but really my mother taught me how to draw. I learned color mixing and painting from a single teacher at Temple University in Philadelphia. I did learn advanced drawing techniques from two female drawing teachers at my alma mater (Penn State), but my art education at Penn State was poor otherwise.
Since graduating (1996) I have taken classes at actual art schools in DC and Philadelphia for portraiture.
There is always more to learn. My friend, Erika, is an artist, and when I look at her paintings I feel very untrained.
But I keep working at it, slowly, slowly, slowly. It helps to have to do something weekly for you all... I can be a very lazy person without an assignemnt.
Writing this really got my thinking: I've posted a portrait, but - except for Tess - nobody knows if it captures Francesca's likeness. And really, it doesn't. If I worked on it some more, it would. Maybe my next bunch of drawings will be a charcoal portrait linked to a photograph of that person so you can be the judge. I think that might be fun.
I was going to say: I can make a very nice drawing of a face, but it never quite looks like who I'm drawing. Annoying! So when people see the drawing, they compliment it - but only if they don't know who it was I was trying to capture!
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