This first assignment felt very intimidating for me as someone who hadn’t taken an art class since elementary school. My approach was basically to just get started on the first drawing and see where it took me. I discovered how burdening my perfectionist tendencies were after hours of work toward that one piece. While I was proud of how my first drawing had turned out, I was also far too burnt out to attempt to proceed with that technique of drawing for my next three things. Because of that, I actually allowed myself to branch out into new areas of experimentation with art styles. As a result, I actually gained a lot of new knowledge regarding how these materials work that I can use for future projects. My least favorite material but initial instinct was for sure charcoal. The fact that it’s harder to control clashes with my want to have things precise and perfect, but it has really grown on me since then. While I don’t think I’ll ever use it for a background value ever again, I’ve come to really love it’s potential messiness and the life that kind of texture can add to a drawing. That said, I think my drawing of the bottle and fabric was the most successful in terms of me learning to embrace materials that made me uncomfortable to work with, but I do still really love my first drawing with the urn in it. I feel like my least successful drawing is the positive/negative study of the lamp. I think there was a misuse of charcoal in that drawing; I wanted clean, bold lines, but instead, smudges will forever cover the white of that drawing. I think it could have become a more interesting piece if I had added more intricate line work as well. I hope to continue breaking out of my comfort zone in future assignments to improve my art skill.
