Sunday 10 February 2008

'Apples From The Teacher'



This weekend is my busy one of the month with two day-long workshops to tutor.
This time there was quite a lot of preparation involved as I had to trawl our home library, photocopy suitable images- AND research suitably tasty apples in the supermarket!
We had a day of contrasts- the morning was spent on an accurate observational study, and in the afternoon the freedom of the imagination was let loose on pen-and-ink (see pics)
One would think that the morning would be the more taxing of the options, but 'it ain't necessarily so!' Good drawing doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with inventiveness or inspiration, and the opposite is also true.
The greatest artists have both-I can't remember who, but a famous French artist said "Sans metier, il n'y a pas d'inspiration"........."without craftsmanship there is no inspiration".
Back to my constant cry of "Should always have a good grounding in basic skills..!"

2 comments:

Sue England said...

Hi Caroline
Glad to see you are working hard! I am just starting my years 'project' to record/draw/paint/photograph what I grow (vegetable-wise!)and couldn't agree more that we need a good grounding in the basic skills-and how do we get those? Just do it! Was interested in your bit about portraits-too scary for me-I think I'll stick to inanimate objects.

Caroline said...

Hi Sue,
An excellent idea for a project- from seed to marrow, I know which will be the easiest to draw! You're right, practise, practise,not having time is no excuse, we have to put aside time for this!