I enjoyed my first studio class… a classmate brought this amazing piece of ‘brick’ to the class and we spent 3 hours drawing different angles of it using different media…

I started with my trusty fountain pen (the middle drawing), drawing pretty much what i see from where I was sitting. Then I went to get a graphite stick and tried it for the first time (the drawings on the left). I did a blind contour drawing (upper left) and a few studies from different positions. I really love how the graphite sticks work, the lines can be so sensitive and expressive, and it is cable of creating lots of different texture. The only thing I didn’t like is I need to fix it with fixative or it’d smear. I also tried a white board marker (upper right) and ended up with a drawing with lots of straight lines and a graphic look. I’ve also done a few other studies with pastels (chalk pastel, oil pastel, dry pastel) but don’t really like how they turned out. All of these were done on my A4 size sketchbook, but we need to do a final larger piece based on the studies we’ve done, so I went for the graphite sticks again and did a drawing on the most interesting part of the brick (lower right). We were supposed to create something new on the final piece, but I seem to have problems going abstract and my final piece is still quite representational.

drawing a brick from different angles