The pencil drawings by Jennifer are especially interesting. Like many people, as a child she loved drawing. Then, as she grew into adolescence she found it more and more difficult to draw successfully, so that by the time she was an adult she had pretty much stopped drawing altogether.
Jennifer is an executive salesperson who travels all over the world for her company. She doesn’t have a whole lot of free time to spare, and says that she travels so much she sometimes wakes up in the morning and has to think for several minutes over just where she is in the world. In that context, she also didn’t have much time to devote to learning a skill she thought beyond her grasp.
She has always been inspired, however, by a very creative aunt who nevertheless made her long to learn how to draw. She was able to make astonishing progress over the course of the five days.
Before
After
Jennifer drew her hand on Friday night, before my instruction. Although she paid careful attention to drawing her watch, she nevertheless was very much challenged by the idea of drawing her hand, and ended by drawing a symbol for her hand.
She drew her hand this way the next day, on Saturday morning. She didn’t have time to develop the light and shadow more to give her drawing more depth, but her work still shows she has begun to understand how to “see” like an artist. Note the foreshortening of her fingers; this is one of the most difficult concepts for art students to assimilate.
Before
After
In these pencil drawings by Jennifer, she was assigned to draw a portrait of someone else. Here she drew a friend from memory before instruction.
Yet four days later drew this portrait of a fellow student.
Before
After
Jennifer had drawn this self-portrait on Friday night, before my instruction. Note the tendency to draw symbols for the mouth, nose and eyes.
Only five days later, she drew this sensitive self-portrait.
Jennifer, who is French, said this about taking a class with me. My translation into English from the French:
“As far as I’m concerned, this was the first time I took a drawing class, and when you look at my drawings you can see that I went from zero to infinity in five days. I think that Deborah has qualities as a teacher that are just enormous, both in her ability to guide our drawing and in her way of expressing herself. You get what she’s explaining so easily that when it comes to the drawing part I felt confident. Even for the really extremely difficult drawings, I knew I was going to manage to do them by the end of the training. So I strongly recommends this course!”