[one drawing #17] moonlight

July 5, 2018July 5, 2018Leave a comment

This is another practice of copying the great Georges Seurat’s charcoal drawing.
I usually choose the drawings that look pretty easy, and every time end up crying out with agony “Oh, it’s so much harder than my expectation! (Maybe he had better paper… or better eraser?)”

Practice after Seurat’s <Factories by Moonlight>

I had to improvise a looooooooot on purpose or not on purpose (mostly not….rather involuntarily forced to!) 🧐
This is Seurat’s original painting <Courbevoie: Factories by Moonlight>

Georges Seurat <Courbevoie: Factories by Moonlight>, Conté crayon on paper

ps: a little slideshow to commemorate finishing my first sketchbook!

[one drawing #15] rays

July 3, 2018July 6, 2018Leave a comment

I finally got a fixative spray from Blick Art Materials in Central Square, Cambridge (MA). It means that I can keep my charcoal drawings without worrying about them evaporating(?)!Charcoal is my favorite material so far because so many shades can be expressed with such a simple stick… of course, when your hand is not so tight/shaky. And it is so much fun to erase out spaces. I love charcoal also because it is the first material that my teacher (Anne McGhee) taught me to draw. Lastly, it looks so cool (artist-like?… haha) to draw with charcoal!To celebrate my first purchase of fixative spray, I decided to draw something with charcoal today. The only problem was that it was already 10:00pm when I could sit down for drawing. I skimmed through the drawing book of Seurat that I borrowed from Cambridge Public Library, and found the fantastic drawing that I wanted to copy. The drawing seemed to have every aspects that I needed to practice for like middle tone, dark parts, erased out spaces etc. (Oh, how amazing that Seurat expresses the rays by erasing out the sunlight!)

Georges Seurat, ‘Rays’, 1884

So audaciously I drew, and here is my charcoal drawing: so FIXED to the sketchbook with my new FIXATIVE spray!I know, I know… it looks so different from Seurat’s but well…. that is why he is the Master! I noticed so may things I want to change after I took the photo, but found out it was impossible to fix charcoal drawing after putting on the fixative spray.

*one small tip: The book <Georges Seurat, the Drawings> by Museum of Modern Art (MoMA in NY) is the absolute best if you want to study Seurat’s drawings and paintings.

Georges Seurat <The Drawings>

[one drawing: 1] a cat

June 9, 2018July 4, 20181 Comment

Today I started to learn drawing from the wonderful teacher who happens to be living in the same apartment of mine. Whenever I tried to draw something, I tended to get very scared. Perhaps my unpleasant middle school memories where I was one of the WORST drawing students in the art class, had kept me from drawing anything.

Now I am planning a train trip across the US in late July, I wanted to become like one of those cool people who draw something (like in their sooooooo cool Moleskin notebook!), I cautiously reached out to the teacher and she so gratefully accepted me as a student.

So here I am starting a new series (not that I have any notable thread but still…) ‘one drawing’, meaning ‘one drawing at a time.’

This picture is the one I drew right after I got back from the first lesson, using charcoal.

The teacher told me to look at some of Seurat’s charcoal paintings, no, no, I mean drawings!, …so I did. And among eye opening drawings (I never imagined so much can be done with that simple charcoal!) this drawing of a cat just caught my heart right away.