I planned to draw the students in one of my classes, because they would be doing a series of quick free writing--so I just made their exercises three minutes long and explained to them what I would be doing at the same time! Actually, this led to a terrific conversation about learning "art"--them as novice creative writers and me, their professor, as a novice visual artist. It was really a good conversation.
Anyhow, below you'll see three pages.
First, two brush sketches I did of my dog Nora just as I left the house. I did both of these in a total of three minutes. Just warming up, practicing catching shapes. The negative space stood out for me here. These actually look like her. I really like the quick, scribbly, but effective nature of these!
Second, repetitions of three students I saw in an atrium at school. I don't know these students. You can see I made a celebratory mess. I tried wet on wet for fun. I started and restarted. I totally screwed some stuff up. I like the light on the man at the top of page 2. And I like the shading/volume work on all four in the right column on page 3.
Third, ten of my students done each in three minutes in one sitting as they did writing exercises. I rather enjoy these quick three-minute sketches. For me, it completely shuts the internal critic down and frees me up to experiment because I can get ten tries in within a half hour. Try. It failed. Do it again, and again.... so at the end of my thirty-minute session I really feel like I have experimented and learned. I'm glad to have discovered this for future work.
What messy, fast and loose fun! And I feel like I'm learning, getting braver, and advancing toward my goals! YAY!
This post comes from work I did in a class with Roz Stendahl, Drawing Practice: Drawing Live Subjects in Public. I recommend it!
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