Thoughts on Drawing- Natalie Ferguson

I had a lot of incorrect assumptions on how this class would be. I thought it would be the class where I could relax and take a break from my tougher classes. Although I did enjoy becoming immersed in my work, it often became incredibly frustrating when I was forcing myself to be creative or when the ideas in my head never quite came out right on the paper. Each week, as I came into class and saw the skills of my classmates, I became more and more humbled as I realized the weaknesses in my own abilities.
Unlike my other classes though, I felt there was a direct correlation with the quality of the work and the amount of time I devoted to it. For instance, I started focusing a lot on the minor details as the class went on, and saw that the content in my work greatly improved.
There were certain concepts that really helped my compositional abilities. In the past, I have only drawn people. I normally start with the eyes and build the face from their. Often this works because I feel as though I am uncovering a recognizable face. When it comes to a building or still life requiring a lot of perspective and proportions  this idea of working on one small piece and building out is incredibly problematic. I would work very hard on a single object only to realize that it was much larger than it should have been.The concept of first focusing on the big picture before adding details really helped improve my work. I also really appreciated the advice to use your pencil or other objects to have a better understanding of perspective. More often than not, I would draw small objects unnecessarily large, or exaggerate angles according to how my brain perceived them.
Another concept that really worked for me was practicing ahead of time to warm myself up to draw. At first, I underestimated the importance of this, especially when it came to study drawings. The difference between my study drawings and final drawing was astounding. I almost felt the need to do multiple study drawings ahead of time. Even before drawing my study drawings, I really found it helpful to simply sketch to become more comfortable with the pen before I moved onto more meaningful work.
Throughout the semester, I only focused on using one type of pencil or one type of charcoal for my pieces, but began to find it useful to vary the softness according to the task at hand. This was really helpful when moving from heavily shaded areas to more sunlit parts of my drawings.
I think my biggest accomplishment from this class was learning how to better draw architecture. This has always been a huge struggle for me, since my work is normally much more fluid. For my final project, I really wanted to try to draw Duke's gothic architecture. In the end, the drawing was not perfect, but it was far better than I expected given my past struggles with the buildings (as seen in the previous works). It was also so nice to look back on my earlier works and see a huge improvement in my spacial workings.
Though I have always loved drawing, I never really made time for it, or felt that I could really successfully get very far. Now having the materials and the knowledge on how to create an artwork, I am really excited to work on pieces over breaks. All in all, despite this class being much more time intensive than I expected, I am really glad I took it because I am far more confident in my abilities!

Thoughts on Drawing- Ali

            I’ve always been a color type of girl. When I was young, every Christmas list included a wish for a fresh 120 pack of Crayolas with the handy sharpener on the back, a replacement for last year’s pack that had since become dull and broken. I spent hours coloring various characters and scenes in coloring books, even to the extent that I can still identify half of the ridiculously-named colors, such as “Macaroni and Cheese” and “Purple Pizzazz,” and can differentiate between “Green Yellow” and “Yellow Green.” I was ecstatic when my parents registered me for art class and I was introduced to the magic of watercolor and acrylic paints, a passion I have continued to enjoy and have expanded since. My friends and family always ask me about naming specific shades or matching colors, and I love helping people decide on paint swatches for house walls (or, to be honest, playing with color swatches in general).

Hence, I overlooked “Introduction to Drawing” when I was considering an art class for this semester because my eyes were first drawn to painting, photography, and digital classes. However, in discussing my art class choices with a similar-minded friend who had taken Drawing 199 last semester, I reconsidered my choice. She raved about the class’s ability to bring down stress level and discover new ways of thinking. Though I had never taken a classical drawing class or really learned any techniques of drawing, I wanted to expand my boundaries of art. At first I was hesitant, anticipating an entire semester of creating art that only consisted of blacks, whites, and shades of gray, but I soon decided that this could be an aspect of the art form to embrace.

Though it has been especially challenging with an overloaded schedule, deciding to pursue drawing was definitely a decision I do not regret. With so much varied work for my other courses, whether writing, reading, analyzing, computing, studying, etc., it was sometimes frustrating to force myself to spend four—or later in the semester even ten—hours total with my drawing board. Rather than thinking of drawing as a break, it took me a while to come to the realization that drawing work, though of a very different type, is an equally legitimate use of my time as working on tasks for other classes. At times I had to force myself to sit down and make a conscious effort to block out stressful thoughts of everything I had to do for my other classes and focus simply on putting the graphite or charcoal to the paper. It takes so much concentration and thought to fix something that isn’t working out “quite right” and to render objects as you see them. Yet, there is something inevitably satisfying about taking a step back from a piece after endless hours of meticulous work and knowing that you have accomplished something worthwhile and to the best of your ability.

Throughout the semester, I have learned to fall in love with drawing and embrace its unique identity as an art form. Rather than expression through color, I now appreciate the subtleties of shading, line variation, textures, and values, all of which I hadn’t explicitly thought about before. Because of the class, in some ways I see the world around me differently. I’ve found that I better appreciate the complexity of architecture after spending hours trying to mirror it on the drawing pad. Rather than seeing expanses of grass, pavement, or stone as empty planes, I notice the nuanced textures and think about how they could be rendered on paper. I pay attention to shadows, especially how they differ from objects themselves and change throughout the course of a day. I see interesting shapes for the negative and positive spaces that they create. In all, the class has been invaluable for me not only in expanding my artistic boundaries but also in altering the way I interact with the world as a creative individual. Thank you, Professor Fick, for enabling and encouraging this transformation and for a great semester!

Thoughts on Drawing

Before this semester, drawing was a foreign concept to me.  Yes, I had doodled when I was bored in class and dabbled in stick figure drawing, but I had never spent a significant amount of time sketching any type of object or scenery.  My first day of drawing class was terrifying and overwhelming; as I looked at previous students’ work, I wondered how in the world I would ever fill up an entire page of Bristol board that size.

As we began to practice in class and for assignments, drawing became a fun challenge.  While drawing requires creativity, as I expected, I also learned there is a science to making a drawing realistic.  In order to perfect this science, one must measure the scale of items in relation to each other and place them correctly on the page.  A scientific artist also must sketch what they actually see and not what they perceive or think they should be seeing. Learning to look at my subjects in this manner has been my greatest challenge throughout this class.

While drawing scenery was very difficult, I really enjoyed getting to know Duke’s beautiful campus while looking for new places to draw.  In the future, I want to continue to work on shading and subtractive drawing techniques. Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote, "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Subtractive drawing techniques interest me because of their unique approach to design; I think I got a late start in the class with these skills due to my lack of experience and only recently started to feel comfortable fully integrating them in my assignments.

My biggest surprise in this course was how much time drawing takes. I have found there to be a great deal of truth in Camille Pisarro’s words: “It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.” Every week I wished I had more time to spend on my drawings.  As my investment in my work grew, each piece became a personal expression of how I viewed things or places I liked. Although it never became easy, I tried to make sure they were represented in the best way possible.

For someone who’s always moving, learning to sit with my drawing pad for six hours at a time has been no easy task. Drawing has taught me to be patient and focus on the task at hand, to appreciate the stillness and peace in creativity. As I have grown more comfortable with my work, I have grown to enjoy drawing as a stress-relieving experience and to engage in the creative process.

Drawing still does not come easily to me; in some ways, sitting down with my drawing board is still as difficult as it was the first week of class. But as the weeks have passed, I have come to enjoy the challenge of filling a blank Bristol board with my own thoughts. As my portfolio has filled, I have looked back with pride on how much I have learned about drawing—and about myself. As we end this semester, I am excited to see where my future with drawing goes.  Thanks for a great semester Prof Fick!

Thoughts on Drawing - Liz

Drawing to me has always been a way to take something out of my head and put it onto paper. I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember and I can’t imagine there ever being a time in my life where I would be able to stop. 

Drawing is also remembering. Ever since I moved past the legions of headless handless costume designs I made when I was ten, I can remember stuff that was going on in my life by looking at my sketchbooks. Even if I hadn’t drawn something from life or even anything remotely to do with events going on, I can see a picture I drew ten years ago and remember that I really liked some song because of this one time I was hanging out with a friend I haven’t seen in years. Right before I came to Duke, I started to make journal comics to remember things more explicitly and over freshman year, I stopped doing that. 

Since this is the first class in two years that I’ve really had to focus on the basics of drawing and getting back to observational drawing, I’ve been able to realize how much I’ve missed it. In my first two semesters at Duke, I hadn’t stopped drawing, but I’d stopped trying to improve or do anything with it. This class helped remind me that even when it takes hours to do or I still can’t render miles and miles of bricks right that at a fundamental level, I like drawing. It calms me down and it’s one of my favorite kinds of puzzle to solve. Watching how the quality of my product changed with the amount of effort I put into it in this class, I think I appreciate all over again how much I like getting to the end of a project I’ve worked hard on and seeing how I’ve improved.

Drawing

Drawing is something that I enjoy because of the things you can do with it.  Although my creativity and imagination are not very great, drawing allows you to make pictures of things that couldn't normally happen, or can give you different senses or feelings.  Drawing helps to develop these skills of creativity, imagination, and making people feel something through your drawing.  I enjoy seeing other's art that has great creativity or imagination that can bring you into another type of world, like M. C. Escher's drawing.

     

Drawing also is great because it I can focus on what I am doing better than I can on other things, and sometimes it can also keep me awake in class.  Even though it's not easy all the time and you might get frustrated that you can't do something the way you want to, drawing is a fun activity for me.

Janvi's Thoughts on Drawing

I can easily say drawing was my first passion. Armed with a box of crayons, I spent my pre-school and elementary school days filling coloring books and sketchbooks. I can even remember distinct times when I learned something that improved my drawing: when my 1st grade teacher taught me to shade all in the same direction, when I first drew a 5-point star, when my best friend showed me how much more realistic drawing people looked if you just remembered to draw in their necks. Now that I think back on it, all these mini-lessons were just learning new techniques or learning how to "see" better - lessons that I felt I expanded on greatly over the course of this semester.

As I grew up, my informal doodling and drawing was replaced with a newfound love of painting and mixed media projects. Although I pursued art outside of school during high school, I felt that I lost that creative outlet when I got to college. I also wanted to gain a more fundamental understanding of the techniques underlying drawing and artistic practice in general. I feel that through this course, I was able to do just that - I never knew the power of the eraser, or how to use your pencil to get accurate drawings. Most of all, I was glad to have deadlines to my artwork, which forced me to complete drawings, whereas on my own I would probably start something and never be motivated to finish. Now, at the end of the semester, I am astonished by how much I have accomplished.

After all this, what does drawing mean to me now? Personally, although the connection may not be salient, I love thinking about how drawing pertains to my academic interests. As a neuroscience major, while I struggled drawing perspectives and shading realistically, I thought about how our visual perception might cause us to make these mistakes. Though we might believe we see everything for how it truly is, in actuality our perceptual system only processes what we pay attention to, and makes simplifying assumptions in order to provide us with relevant information. That's why, when I look at objects far away and try to draw them without using my pencil to actually measure it, I tend to draw things that are further away larger than they "actually" are from my perspective, because I know how big they should be if I were standing right next to them. We make this assumption because it's useful to be able to identify an object far away as a chair big enough for us to sit in, for example, not a tiny mini-chair (which is what it actually looks like from a distance). Professor Fick told us that art is about "turning off your brain" and focusing on what you see. This really resonated with me as I worked on my drawings this semester and tried to overcome my brain's processes to draw something realistically.

Although this course was much more challenging than I had expected, I appreciated the opportunity for creative expression and to develop my skills as an artist. Thank you, Professor Fick!

Wandering thought's on Drawing

I love drawing because of its ability to create wonder within form.

It can be so simple.

…"simply a line going for a walk" - Paul Klee

& it can be so complex.

It is a peaceful place of purpose within pattern.

It is a forest of figures that frantically force themselves forward onto the page.

It is the texture on the tips of touchables leaving untouchable prints on imaginations.

It is a scribble or mark, a scratch on the itch of creation.

It is everyday.