Week 1 - Mike Sibley course at drawspace.com

As many of you know, I'm a huge Mike Sibley fan. I could devote a whole month to writing about Mike but others have already done that, and much better then I could, I might add. The purpose of this post, and other to come, is a week by week laymen's viewpoint on his graphite drawing class on Drawspace.com.




Week 1.

After a brief explanation as to what we could expect throughout the course, Mike covered some basic tools we'll need. Of course, pencils and paper were at the top of the list.  He offered an insite as to what he uses and why. Besides the basics, he also introduced us to using Blu-Tack in place of a kneaded eraser. Having purchased Mike's book, "Drawing from Line to Life" I was already familiar with Blu-Tack and how he came to use it in place of a kneaded eraser. If you are not familiar with this product you definitely need to try it. In my opinion it is superior to any kneaded eraser I have tried to date.

We then moved on to actually drawing something. The exercises in week 1 are designed to give Mike a feel for where you are as graphite artist. Mike's feed back showed me that I need to concentrate on getting my darks as dark as I can as I have a tendency to hold back. By going dark I avail myself of a wider range of tone and in turn add more depth to my drawing. I also learned how to look for white content that will visually dilute the strength of the tone.

Oh, and before we read or did anything, Mike had us draw a feather without looking at a reference. It told Mike a lot but he's not saying.  All he said about mine was "interesting".  The purpose of the exercise was to have a yard stick that we could use for comparison at the end of the course. All I can say is we apparently have some very strange birds around here and in my defense , I'm a city boy, so the only feathers I see fall out of pillows and pigeons.