Wyatt gave me the most beautiful sketchbook for valentines day. It is so cool. It’s got a suede leather cover, with big upholstery tacks for the seams. And the whole book is huge, with nice big heavy pieces of smooth, slightly creamy paper inside. Every artist I’ve shown it to has been green with envy. I decided to use it to learn figure drawing. It would be great if I already was a great artist and could fill it with masterpieces. But I’m not, so it will have to be full of learning experiments.
I’ve never felt very confident in my drawing abilities. And since drawing is a fundamental element of most forms of visual art, I’ve never felt much like an artist. But this spring I’m taking a figure drawing class. I hope it will teach me two things: how to draw, and how to have confidence in my drawing ability. It’s through the community education courses; it’s an 8 week program of once a week for three hours. But there is one woman who has been in there for two sessions (and her work looks much better than the rest of ours!) and the teacher said the class is part of his four year program. He said there’s no way to learn figure drawing in eight weeks. So it looks like I’m in it for the long haul!