Jocelyn Curry

When our little group met up for the first time in January, we talked about what we might focus on in 2013. Not that our "focus" is all that rigid. After all, there's the coffee-and-pastry period that precedes the drawing. First things first, right?

But back to drawing. The consensus was that we would work on loosening up, becoming more confident and faster at the same time. So yesterday, I led the group through some drawing exercises with that goal in mind. Here are the second and third sets of sketches we did:

A raku-fired pot in terra cotta and black offered challenges in achieving accurate perspective & form, too. We sketched in graphite and then applied colored pencil. The emphasis in adding color was to be painterly in the use. I.e., terra cotta clay is more than one color, really, so we layered color and tried not to stay in the box. My sketch is on the left.

As a last subject, I offered an aloe plant in an orange pot. With five minutes left in our session, we had no choice but to work quickly and confidently to get the basic shapes indicated on our paper. By this time we were warmed up after our first two subjects. We ended up going overtime, finishing our sketches with focus in 18 minutes. (Mine is on the right.) When students ask me how to achieve a spontaneous look to their sketches, I usually tell them that it has to do with speed & lack of time to overthink it. With the aloe plants, I talked us through a sequence of drawing moves. The result: some nicely impressionistic aloe vera plants!