My first art class
Technically my first class was in senior year of high school. I took AP Art. I do not remember any specific lessons.. yeah it was more of a filler kind of class. My teacher did not really teach us. I have no idea what she did during class. Anyway. I took my first instructed art class last month in December at an art studio about 30 minutes away from my work place.
The class was titled Realism drawing. I was planning to recap each class I had but, uh, I didn't. We learned a lot about improving our observational skills. My instructor was attentive and gave great feedback. I feel like drawing has been my hobby since I was younger but if I were to count the days I treated it like a skill to develop, it would definitely be less than a year.
I enjoy traditional drawing a lot more now. I found that if I use a reference, it's better for me to print it out rather than looking at my phone or computer monitor.
I wanted to post some of my work during the class. I found it hard to work outside of class but I was able to dedicate a couple of hours.
Some of things of note that stood out to me:
- Using relative measuring to improve observational drawing
- I'm terrible at drawing negative space. It's something I have to work on. But it's useful figuring out shapes especially for flowers or organic objects..
- We had five classes. During the second class I started to take notes because I realized after the first class, my memory completely wiped. I'm not an auditory learner.
- "Your lightest dark will always be darker than your darkest light"
- Applying tone is hard. I would like to buy pencils with harder lead. The paper I used was textured and my lead was generally on the softer side (B+)
- Drawing on black paper with white pencil is really fun
- We went over facial parts before going over the full face. To me, it's kind of weird but I understand why it's hard to jump into the entire face. I may apply this to learning emotions
I enjoy drawing portraits. I'd like to take the portrait class someday. Likeness is really difficult.. I'm taking figure drawing next quarter though. I've never taken a figure drawing class but I'm looking forward to it.
I intended to write about art more it kind of fell off since comic con.. lots of things in my life fell off. I think I drew a lot in 2025 but I have a terrible memory of it.