Class Begins Again

Jan 25

I’ve been teaching an adult beginning drawing class for about a year and a half. It leaves me exhausted, as it starts two hours after my shift at the front desk ends, but I love it. I appreciate having the time to force myself to create something, and I love helping other people gain confidence in their abilities.

It’s a night class, every Tuesday for six weeks. I have a cap of 10 and enrollment has fluctuated between 4 and 9. I find eight students to be the sweet spot. This time I have four. Two were a few minutes late, which is totally fine, but I worried I’d only have two students, which is………..tough.

But all of the students were lovely. We laughed a lot. A real range of ages as well as skill levels.

The students liked the "magic tricks" I showed them: One is how to use a kneaded eraser to pull up just a little bit of graphite; the other is using tracing paper. Last fall I tried something new: write A and B on either side of the tracing paper. This has proved much more successful in teaching people how to use it.

They all worked through the break (which meant I did, too, lol).

For the first day, I set up two easels. One has a newsprint pad where I demon the techniques we’re talking about, and the other has a poster on it. I had purchased really large pencils for demo purposes last fall, but then forgot them at home. So this was the first time I got to use them. (By "large," I mean girth; they are meant for pre-schoolers). They worked really well on the newsprint, and I liked the option of switching back and forth between pencil and charcoal. I prefer using charcoal for demos, but it doesn't do everything I need it to do.

The final lesson of the evening is drawing together. Well, I draw something and they can just watch or draw along as they wish. I started doing that last spring, and the toughest part has been getting the poster displayed correctly. I had an epiphany: use binder clips to fasten the poster to a drawing board, and prop that on the easel. Worked like a charm!

First I drew a "horse." It was roughly based on the photo, but I didn't do all the "draw a shape, draw an outline" steps, the boring steps. So it's really more a drawing of a generic horse from my imagination. Then I draw a horse using the steps we'd just talked about. Flipping back and forth between the two, everyone was like "oh wow!" It was really cool to have a concrete example, that happened before their eyes, of why we follow all those steps.

I also made sure to tell them that horses are hard to draw in general, but easy to find posters of.