Drawing

Drawing....where to begin?

I think taking this drawing course has been a bit a of challenge for me. I don't spend much time drawing, other than doodles. In my high school, our art course weren't very focused on any one medium. Instead we explored as many as we could and if we felt more comfortable with certain ones then we usually stuck to that one medium when doing bigger projects. For me that was painting and creating stencils. Naturally drawing didn't become a strong point of mine. Even outside of class, I was not able to really do much art especially around senior year when my schedule became more intense. Thus, when I began my college career I decided I would try and take some art courses. One of which was this drawing course.

At first, I was not all too confident about taking the course. As I said, drawing was not really a strong point. I had initially taken the course as a prerequisite to take the painting course in the Spring. I thought that drawing will perhaps improve my skills in painting and how to work with the tones of hues better.
With my first projects, study drawings, and sketches, I used my pencils and charcoals as if they were brushes. I never really defined edges nor had a range of lines or colors.  I was not used to having to, nor needing to smear and smudge in order to create shades. It was rather difficult to control the pieces I made.
This was obviously a critique I received again. Eventually, I was able to get increasingly better at it and tried slowing down when drawing not just recklessly passing my pencil back and forth as I did with a brush. I too more time to focus on single areas at a time, paying attention to work on values and texture, making it more emphasized.

Although, I feel that my skills in drawing still need more work and will most likely aways need improving on, I do feel that it has helped me in accomplishing my goal at being able to implement the skills I learned in this course to my own personal art as will as paintings that I would like to create. This Christmas break seems like an ideal time to try my hand at it.