Drawing Practice class, Lawrence Arts Center

“Blind” contour drawing

I am excited to offer a class called “Drawing Practice” at the Lawrence Arts Center this Winter. It will meet once a week for 8 weeks on Tuesday evenings, January 9 to February 27, 2024, 6:30-8:30pm. Enroll online, or at the Lawrence Arts Center.

This introductory drawing class will focus both on exercises to strengthen our ability to draw from observation, as well as additional exercises to strengthen our abilities to draw from memory and imagination. Each student will be provided a sketchbook of their own to use and to keep, and basic drawing tools will be provided to use during class.

Mapping darks and lights

We’ll draw from still life setups as we engage classic skill-building drawing exercises such as contour drawing, gesture drawing, continuous line drawing, sighting methods to help us to draw in proportion, and exercises that help us draw light and shadow, too. In addition, we’ll doodle a lot (and “noodle”), we’ll make loose and controlled drawings, we’ll enlarge, abstract, stretch, and distort our drawings, and we’ll draw at different rates of speed. We’ll practice drawing from memory in different ways, we’ll imagine monsters made from random marks, we’ll go on drawing scavenger hunts, and we’ll chronicle our day — just for fun — as a simple 4-panel cartoon.

Turning “doodles” into “monsters”

Our class will serve as a support group for drawing outside of class, too, and we’ll think about strategies to help us make time to draw at least a little bit each day — but we’ll never beat ourselves up if daily drawing isn’t something we can do — homework is always optional. Our goal in this class is to simply draw enough to forget whether or not our drawing is “good.” Our goal is to practice as much as we can, and by doing so, to make drawing a pleasurable part of our everyday lives.

You can register for the class on-line or in person at 940 New Hampshire St., Lawrence, KS, phone 785.843.2787. Financial aid and senior discounts are available.

Artist Prints and Cards at the Phoenix Gallery and Art Love Collective


I have affordable artist prints and cards for sale at the Phoenix Gallery and Art Love Collective, both in downtown Lawrence, Kansas. I have different cards and prints at each location. At the Phoenix, the prints are in the print section at the back of the store, and the cards are currently in a basket on the south wall before the print section. Print and card locations at Art Love will  move around over time. Check them both out, and check again from time to time for new offerings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Drawing at the Lawrence Art Guild’s All-Member’s Show

I have a new drawing (and a new collage) in the Lawrence Art Guild’s All-Members show July 15 through September 30, 2022, at Landmark National Bank (4621 W. 6th St., Lawrence, KS). All are invited to the opening reception on Friday, July 15, 5:30-7:30 pm.

 

“These Days”

2022

Pencil and gouache on paper

“Drawing Stories” at the Lawrence Arts Center

I really enjoyed facilitating my class called Drawing Stories, an introduction to drawing comics, this past Fall at the Lawrence Arts Center. I say “facilitated” instead of “taught” because the real teachers of my class are the comic artists whose drawing exercises we use, artists who have written interesting and influential books on creating comics, among them Lynda Barry, Scott McCloud, Ivan Brunetti, and Jessica Abel and Matt Madden.

 

I squeeze a lot into the eight two-hour sessions, so much so that I will probably make this a twelve-week class in the future. In Drawing Stories, we learn by doing. We keep a sketchbook-journal with drawing exercises and experiments in it. Then we share our work and learn from each other, supporting each other as we go. And yet no one is ever required to share their work, because we all have different comfort levels with that.

 

 

 

In the first class, we experiment with doodling and drawing, playing around with different pens and pencils, and finding a simple visual vocabulary for communicating our first ideas. We draw stories without words at first, then bring words into the mix, considering the unique ways that words and pictures work together. By week four, we’re thinking about characters and how to draw them, how each character’s expressions, gestures, clothes, and environment reflect who they are and what they’re up to. In other sessions we focus on the varying grid formats available for a single page comic, how the eye flows from one panel to the next, and how one might visually  transition from scene to scene in a story. We practice techniques, too, such as penciling, inking, lettering, and making titles and word bubbles.

 

 

 

The most fun we have, though, are the times when we make collaborative comics — a “comic jam.” We use plain old copier paper for this, dividing each piece of paper into a grid of nine panels. Everyone has a grid-page in front of them with an attached “parameter,” a theme or principle that each artist must follow to guide the learning process as well as the form or content of each one-page comic. Each student draws the first panel on their comic-page and then hands it over to someone else in a willy-nilly fashion, until everyone has drawn at least one panel of each comic before we trade and draw some more, until all nine panels are filled. Some examples of the kinds of parameters we’ve used include: “no words,” “dialogue only,” “start at the end and draw the panel before the last one,” and “write a caption for the next panel.” But these are just a few examples, the possibilities are endless, and the laughs are, too.

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Individual student comics are shared with permission from each student. Click on each to enlarge for better viewing. Artists are, from top to bottom: Michael Galvin, Grace Wise, Class Comic Jam, James Adaryukov, Casey Carlile, and Jill Rohde.