can you draw?

the answer is yes. yes, you can.

TLDR: I like teaching drawing classes and the next one starts 3/23, with early bird pricing through 3/1

oldie but a goodie, me as a guest artist at BRCC in 2018(?) talking with my hands

As a teacher, I love an icebreaker.

It helps me to connect a little about a new student with their name, which I often forget. As a bonus, it is an excuse for me to share whatever useless tidbit is in my brain. I have asked students if they prefer cake or ice cream, summer or winter, ocean or river swimming, what are they drinking, what are they reading, what’s good, and my favorite for any print class, what do you know about printing?

It helps me gauge the class, asses how much background folks might need. Sometimes we laugh, often I am surprised, and sometimes, like the print question, it leads me to our lesson for the day. When I ask Intro to Letterpress students what do they know about printing, some of them answer nothing, some have a little experience with one of many kinds of printmaking, occasionally some one has typeset before. After the icebreaker, I offer my definition of printmaking: putting ink on or through a thing, then using the thing to transfer the ink, with pressure, onto a surface, aka a print.¹

It is helpful to have a concise and general working definition that connects stamps and screen printing and what your home printer does. As a particularly verbose person who likes to dance around an idea, offering seventy two suggestions that could lead to a gesture of an idea, I like to start with something broad and concrete. It gives students something to hold on to as I spend the following 8 hours demonstrating the 4,028 steps to letterpress printing.²

For February’s pay-what-you-can class, I opted to have a drawing party. Most people would not connect that it was scheduled a few days after Mardi Gras ended and friends’ photos have started flooding social media. This only makes sense if you know that I lived in New Orleans until 2020. But I digress from my digression.

To open this Drawing Party, I asked my students if they could draw. Rarely is there a wrong answer in my class, but this time the answer is yes. Yes, you can draw. If this sounds familiar, you may know I have a class based on the idea that many folks think they can’t draw, and I think that they can.

I drew a tree with my eyes closed in a warm up exercise and it kind of looks like a tree!

The “I Can’t Draw” Drawing Workshop has been around in different forms since 2016 and in March it returns as a six week online workshop. In fact, the Drawing Party idea comes from the last day of the workshop. When I offered this class in person, our last class would be a party and chance to share. I would set up 5-8 activity stations across our tables. After a warm up together, students would spend 5-15 minutes at each spot, collaborating on free form drawing, or trying pastels on extra large paper, or attempting to draw an emotion using color but no lines.

Online, the drawing party is a little more challenging.³ Once, we tried using a spinner with activities listed, but it was chaos, creating a weird order to the class, and I as much as I appreciate anarchy, I also appreciate a good arc to a class.

For Friday’s Drawing Party, I planned activities, soem quick ones to warm up then two longer sessions. We tried something new, had some laughs, and finished in time for me to read at the bar.⁴

This is the longest way of saying: drawing is fun. Drawing is making a mark on a surface directly, and I love sharing a bunch of ways of making marks. I like thinking about abstract drawings, and non-representational drawings. I love sharing ideas with students, and incorporating their discoveries into future classes. At least two activities are named after former students.

In art school, I dreaded some of my drawing classes because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t see what the instructor wanted me to see. I needed practice, but I had no background with it. I never took drawing in high school, and I was understandably struggling in my third semester of life drawing.

But in my fourth semester of drawing, I had the option of taking “Drawing Workshop,” instead of another painful semester of life drawing. Quickly, I incorporated collage, copying images in pencil, and sewing. I saw others make paintings that read like flat maps, and soft pillows of color. The range was remarkable. The girl who had called my final in life drawing “cartoonish” and otherwise disparaged my best attempt at a self-portrait was in there too, but the instructor didn’t treat the ability to render well as the only important part of a drawing.

Drawing in a supportive environment reminded me that I actually like drawing, even from life. I include some exercises for drawing from life in “I Can’t Draw,” because it is a skill, and you need to practice. I love a low stakes drawing class, doodling, and appreciating other’s abilities. And even if I can’t remember that teacher’s name, I appreciate the painting instructor who let offer for critique a pile of handmade paper ruffles sewn onto a page. It was a slightly bratty move on my part, borne of exhaustion in my final semester, but it was a chance to defend my art and hear what others thought, aside from that same girl who insisted it was sculpture.

Still think you can’t draw? I know you probably meant that when you draw a tree it looks like an onion and when you draw an onion it looks like a planet. I know you mean you can’t draw an accurate self-portrait but let’s be honest, do any of us really have an accurate idea of what we look like?

The question I never is answer directly is: who cares if you can’t’ draw? maybe a more helpful question is: what do you want from your drawing? I like to record an impression of places I visit, but if I am going for a recognizable replication of an animal, I may not draw it free hand. Sometimes I draw to keep my hand moving, because I am on a boring zoom, or just to do something I don’t usually do. For all the folks who showed up last Friday, thanks for partying with me.

The “I Can’t Draw” drawing workshop starts 3/23, for 6 weeks, from 5-7 pm PST, online, classes are recorded. Sign up by 3/1 and save $100. You can see more about this and all available classes at hopeamico.com/classes.

PS Friends of Devin Saurus: His mom is uniting Devin’s doggo, Mokie, with a new forever home in Louisiana. If you have a little to spare, you can donate here.

1. I also have a one sentence history of Letterpress. Want to hear it?

2. JK it isn’t that many steps. Letterpress is way easier than stone lithography. I hope at least one of you is also an art school printmaker who needs to mention lithography once a year while they still owe for their education, Yuka laughed at this when I shared it with her as she was showing me her Vandercook, which might might might be the future press of Keep Writing.

3. Should I start teaching art in person again?

4. Not a metaphor. My current favorite Friday night activity.