Thoughts on Drawing - Sabrina Tucker

Although it's been well over ten years since I last took a formal art class at school, I decided to follow in the footsteps of many seniors before me and take a drawing/art course while my schedule allowed me. Despite the long gap between my academic art experiences, I had been casually painting with watercolors throughout high school and college but formal drawing turned out to be much more different from painting than I had anticipated.

While the thickness and blurred nature of watercolors can easily hide any mistakes or misshapen subjects, drawing but not sketching with pencils seems to only highlight your errors; this ended up being a double-ended sword, however, because the act of fixing your mistakes so frequently actually improves your skill, I believe. Though experimenting with charcoal was fun and a wholly novel experience for me, I wasn't able to get a hold on how to cleanly execute lines and shapes with it without making a mess of the page or using sketchy lines and shading. However, the fact that I now own charcoal pencils and have the instruction to utilize them now means I'll most likely try them again soon when I'm feeling a bit more patient and brave.

While the time required to finish the drawings increased exponentially over time (especially after our graduation from only line drawings), the accomplishment I felt after completing each assignment also grew with it. There were times when I would take a step back to look at the drawing I was working on after hours of sketching hunched over my desk and be in amazement that I could draw something that decent while there were definitely times when I felt the opposite.

If anyone asked for course recommendations for semesters when they wanted to test their creative capabilities, I think this course and many others in the ARTS/VIS department would be right up their alley.