My experience with drawing classes

Coming into university in September, I was extremely nervous about drawing classes. Coming from a background where my whole A Level grade was based off 5 sheets of sketching that were awful to say the least, meant that even some of the simpler sketching tasks were new and somewhat difficult for myself. However, I quickly learned to love drawing classes, they became my favourite part of the week, even if my sketching wasn't as good as others in the classroom, I could see my work improving and my confidence in my ability growing!

One of the first tasks we had to do was draw a cube in 2 perspectives... something I hadn't done in over 3 years. For some reason I found this extremely hard and felt very defeated afterwards when I was only one of a minority who couldn't do this task. I also remember trying to make all my lines perfectly straight and even used a ruler. I remember measuring the paper to make sure the sides of my cubes were all equal and perfect. Looking back however, this sketch was my worst of the whole year, I spent more time erasing lines and starting again, so by the end of the lesson, my page was covered in faded lines and didn't look like a cube at all.

Fortunately, my drawing improved drastically throughout the year and now I feel like my sketching is the best it has ever been. Personally, I really enjoyed lessons such as the one drawing popcorn since everyone interrupted the popcorn differently and sees different shapes in a single piece. Looking at the random, natural shapes of the popcorn was intriguing and them applying these shapes to a piece of furniture meant that every ones work was so drastically different. Another one of my favourite lessons was sketching our partners hands holding objects. Again, this was all about how we saw the hand and our interpretation and so was different for everyone. Plus, I tend to find it much easier to sketch real life items rather than things that I imagine in my head, which meant this was one of my more confident lessons.

Things such as marker rendering and fine liners were things I had never done and quickly became things that I had to learn in order to improve my sketching and make my work look much more life like. Using fine liners was a quick and easy way of bringing my sketches to life, making them pop off the page. I really love adding thick lines around the outline and then highlight smaller details in thinner lines. However, marker rendering is something that I am not very fond of.... I struggle to evenly blend the colours together, my sketches tend to look streaky and never actually look like shadows and highlights. This is still something that I am working to perfect and improve upon but I can confidently say that my rendering is better than it was when i very first started.

Overall, drawing has been such a big part of my first year of University and I'm glad that I myself can see improvements in my work. My drawings may not be the best in my class, in fact they're far from it, but for me, they are much better than I could even imagine back in September and I hope this is a skill I can continue to build upon and improve as university continues!