9-21-09 and 9-23-09 by Emily Nguyen

The lesson we learned on Monday was the importance of cropping [using a viewfinder]. The assignment was to pick an interesting item and crop it on your own.

By cropping, an artist can achieve new meaning to their work or add a neat perspective that a viewer may not have seen before. For example: an apple is a subject that has been used in drawing a plethora of times. By cropping you could show the viewer just the stem of the apple, therefore giving a new perspective on the apple.

John also covered the varying meanings of color and subject. He used red as an example. Red can mean love, death, life, etc. and it provided a new window to look at a primary color in new ways. This showed us that a red box is not just a red box.

We also went through chapter three and analyzed the effectiveness of different lines. We compared diagrammatic line and structural lines. We brushed up on how different line pressure and width can imply different textures and thickness to an object.

On Wednesday, the exercise we used to warm up for the class was gesture drawing our classmates. After that we choose an item from the closet [still-life room] to draw a contour sketch of. First we focused on sketching the outer contour of the object. We practiced and then John gave us an example of constant contour [blind contour, continuous line]. John had us draw and not look at the paper the entire time. After that he had us draw for thirty minutes and only look down every 10 minutes. This taught us to trust our eyes and move our conte crayon [and hand] with our eyes.

To wrap it up, this last week we emphasized cropping to provide new perspective and worked on creating contour outline with constant lines to teach our hand to follow our eyes.

-Emily Nguyen, USD Drawing I Student