Mini Drawing Class on the Beach, San Jose del Cabo

Everyone Busy at Work,  minus one

Last month I went to San Jose del Cabo for a friend of mine's birthday. She invited family and friends to join her in celebrating in the sun, on a beach, in January. Hard to refuse that little trade-off to winter. Behind my back via email she announced that there would be an "art class" on the beach so to bring pencils and paper with them.

I was told upon arrival that I would be teaching a drawing class, so a time was set, and then changed and set again. Not everyone got the memo for the new time, but we had 7 hearty souls show up. I did a basic demo of using the whole page and not stick your drawing in the middle of the paper unless you drew a frame around it, think about how to compose and to look at the shapes not just the object.(s). I did not specify what to draw. We all then set to work, as you can see, facing different directions. Most of the class was willing to share their work for this blogpost. I was very pleased with what they did and went around one on one to give them more specific guidance. This was a short one hour time frame. Most had little or no art since HS or college, so I was very pleased with their work.

Nice view of the boardwalk. We talked about values and their relationship and also to watch the direction of the sun on the umbrellas.

I talked with her about values. Her spatial relationships were pretty darn good but how to get depth and variety of darkness out of a pencil.

Dale got some good patterns going here in a very nice graphic display.

On this one we talked about perspective and  how to gauge that when trying to draw a row of something as in these posts. You can see where I showed her on the far right post how to use value to carve out other shapes. The buildings that are behind the palm trees were all in shadow with the palm trees so I explained how to think of the whole shadow as one big shape and then bring out some details to separate out the smaller shapes for future reference.

I love that she put in a dog and the life guard tower. This one was monotone when we talked so I showed her how to add depth for a feeling of distance and form.

the only one besides myself to add a figure. She thought her figure looked like a tombstone, so we talked about how to remedy that and also what to do to get more form through light and shadow, although over all the "umbrella" has a good shape to it. The figure was in shade so we made his head darker to break up the solid dark shape and gave his shoulders a bit less of a stiff appearance.

I must have done a decent job with this little mini class as I was told that they want to do it again next year when we all go back for a mid-winter break in the sun. And the people who were "late" want to be included. Can't wait!