My Artwork from "Drawing for Beginners"

So here are some of my drawings from the art course I recently finished at Edmonton Lifelong Learners Association (ELLA). They are posted in order from the initial class until the final one.

First, we were taught how to keep a portrait in proper perspective using measurements (based on the size of the subject's eye) and strategically placed guidelines. This is my mapped-out rendition of Denzel Washington, in case it is not immediately apparent who it is, LOL --

Then we were taught how to shade a portrait using graphite powder, graphite pencils and various erasers for highlighting. My apologies to Bono, who I believe in real life actually has ears --

I quite like this little African girl which we also did in graphite powder, pencil and eraser, but alas! Her one wonky, off-kilter eye shows that my measuring sucked. D'oh!

I had better luck with this dog, done in the next technique we learned of using charcoal pencil together with charcoal powder made from grating a charcoal stick.

This elephant was done in white charcoal powder and white charcoal pencil on black paper. It turned out much better than I thought it would when I started. But again my measurements were off and I made the image too big on the paper. As a consequence, I had no room to put the baby elephant's face that was supposed to be down by mama's trunk. Math has never been my strong suit. Forgive me, Baby Dumbo.

This zebra has what seemed at the time to be a gazillion layers of graphite pencil applied to it. My right arm was sore the next day from all that exertion.

We did this portrait on the last day of class to learn how to use sanguine conté crayon (grated to a powder) together with sanguine conté pencil. Since time was short, screw measuring -- I just drew the giraffe freehand. This has turned out to be one of my favourites! I love the look and warmth of the reddish conté on the cream coloured paper.

We obviously had a very good teacher for this class -- a talented young Edmonton artist named Suzanne Lamoureux. I am currently taking another class from her -- "Sketching in Pen and Ink" -- at the art school where she teaches. So I may have some more artwork to post in a while.

Thanks to My Rare One who let me use a bunch of her art supplies for the ELLA course and who also took the photos of my drawings for this post! *smooch*