thoughts on drawing - andie

I’ve been drawing on my own since elementary school, but I never really had the opportunity to take lessons. It was always a fun free-time activity, and I’ve always enjoyed it as a stress reliever. I think what has been really nice about this class for me is that we’ve worked so much on actually drawing what we see, rather than drawing the preconceived notion of what we see. This never became more evident than when we were working on perspective. During the first attempt at drawing the hallway, I realized I was envisioning myself drawing from a much higher perspective than I actually was, and I had to “lower” myself to the ground level. I also really had to focus on measuring with my pencil to make sure things in the background weren’t getting too large. I think I’ve really improved since then, and my latest few drawings haven’t been as difficult to scale things as that first drawing. I also think that my drawings used to look really cartoony, and I think that our work on value and shading has really helped me get away from that (although I need to keep working on things like trees).

One thing that I really appreciated about this class, especially for the last two assignments, is that we got to look at other people’s work and talk about it in a group. I liked this because it really showed me how to do certain things. For example, in my final drawing I drew some buildings on west campus and I drew in all of the individual bricks. I think I probably would have colored the entire thing one solid color unless I had seen how other people had done similar things drawing the stones/bricks of other buildings. I really am a visual learner and a lot of times I can do something if I have already seen it/something similar to what I’m trying to do. So I really got a lot of ideas and saw really how detailed it was possible to get with these drawings, and I really think it helped me get my final drawing (the fiction drawing) to be a lot better by the end.

I don’t think I’ll have any other chances to take drawing classes in the future (science major, fail). However, I really do hope to keep working on the things I’ve learned this semester because I think sitting down and doing these drawings every weekend were really a nice change of pace from the usual homework. What I really want to keep working on the most is integrating shading/value, line value, and perspective together to make full images, as opposed to drawing singular objects (like earlier in the semester). I’ve really enjoyed this class, and it has definitely helped me get a new perspective (and appreciation) for Duke’s campus in particular.