Letter of critique: framework and analysis

¶ … particularly what you have done and what materials and medium you like best.

Write out your feelings about your experience.

Drawing gives one the ability to use not only imagination but also perception to create artistic depictions of what we see.

[Letter of Critique]

What really entices me about drawing class is that it provides us with the opportunity to invent our own way to draw. Instead of mimicking another's style, we have the creative license to really create people and things as we perceive them, even with an untrained eye.

What better way than drawing to shape what we see in our mind's eye. This is particularly true of drawing other people in the class. We actually compose an image in our mind of the person we see. I may note the shape and color of their eyes, when another student looking at the same person I am, focuses on the shape of their mouth. As an art student we interact with the blank drawing paper and create from our vision.

A particularly like charcoal and pencil. First, charcoal allows us to capture depth and mood, through the various techniques of shading and coloring. It depends on the subject and the characteristics that you are trying to capture and portray. Charcoal can be a wonderful medium for this. However, it does not allow you to animate your subject the way pencil and sometimes paint does. But charcoal can provide unlimited possibilities for interpretation drawings. You can clarify and develop a sketch of a face that captures the essence of what you see in a person. I find charcoal allows me to express and visualize what I capture by looking at a subject.

Pencil is also one of my favorite mediums. It's very suited to capturing the character in someone's face and accentuating facial features and expressions. My goal in my drawings is try and combine my visualization of a subject with how they actually appear. I engage the visual content with my mind's imaginative form and try to create that image. For me, pencil allows me to fully demonstrate what I imagine.

A really enjoy drawing each other in class. We see each other in class as both artist and subject and this makes for very interesting perceptions. One thing I have learned in class is that seeing and perception can be very different from each other. Perception really involves a direct experience with who or what we are seeing.

I think that's one of the other reasons why I like charcoal as a mode of expression. Although using color can be a vibrant addition to expressing what you see, I feel that charcoal and pencil in some cases can concentrate on the features of your subject. It can be a medium that allows you to blend imagination and form and expression with a passion that does not elicit itself in paint.

Drawing really allows us to translate what we see by constructing an image that goes beyond what would be captured by a camera. The great part about drawing each other in class is that we also have a sense of who is behind the face and the form that we draw. This takes on a very different persona than drawing famous people that we don't really know. Although that provides a different form of expression, it is less internalized than drawing from real life.