One of the best ways to start a day is to open the door of the drawing studio and see some anonymous doodles left behind upon what I can only guess is the last remaining blackboard on campus. Most "smart classrooms" have long since evolved with dry-erase paneling and/or digital projections of virtual blackboards. But this is entirely in line with my presumably also being the last professor using those iconic little green grading books.
There was also a recent day when I was introducing Beginning Drawing folks to the usual unit on figure drawing, and all my demos just crashed and burned, as in nothing was working out, and I was having the quintessential "bad art day."
Rather than be overly embarrassed it served as a meta-lesson in both perseverance and tacit acknowledgement that shit happens, and it's far better to be open and honest about what happens to everyone, even to the best of us. That might be a reason why there some instructors that either/or don't ever do public demonstrations so as to avoid potential displays of failure. Be that as it may, I resorted back to my comfort zone, ie what works fastest and bestest: “Whattaya wanna be: Beaver? Moose? Bear?” “Bear” “Polar, Grizzly, or Black?” “Dealer’s choice” "Done."
My favorite exchange occurred whilst working again from models in the morning Beginning Drawing classes, and while sitting one-on-one with a few students through a 5-minute gesture and after talking them through the process from building up loose, simple underlying shapes, slowly dialing it in & refining a basic contour line before dropping in some value etc. I then asked:
"Just keep scribbling until it looks like something”
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| "no lies detected" |
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