From the vault – art classes

I recently had to clear out my childhood home and found all my old school books and visual art diaries and had given up art in my senior years to take on more science classes. Even in uni I had dabbled with it but with life, family, kids I had completely forgotten this part of myself.

It was a bit of a surprise and process of rediscovering myself to find out that I did learn all the basics I’ve been relearning through various art books (Learning to paint in watercolour from books) and had covered the basics of colour, perspective, shading, composition, styles, art history etc. when I picked up watercolour painting again people would ask me about how I learnt and I only had vague memories of doing art classes in primary school.

Looking back at these paintings I can see strains of influences in my paintings now.

So here’s a few from the vault.

I actually did a koala in watercolour a few years ago and completely forgot I had done one previous.

We had an itinerant artist who would do evangelistic live art drawings for us at school to tell us about Jesus. I recall he did a series of classes after school and I attended here are some of the pastel paintings that I think might have come out of those classes.

I recall our art teacher said to draw a portrait of yourself and I sat Infront of the mirror to draw this then brought it in to show her and she said to me “that doesn’t look like you”. I’m still learning to do faces but it was a good start.

I like this one the best and I can see the idea of a picture in a picture using reflection to tell a greater story here. I did this in Reflections of a reflection. I also love the vibrancy of acrylic and might go back to this as medium in the future. I’ve also inherited my mum’s oil paints so might look at experimenting with this when I have more time.

This was an assignment for the international year of the elderly and had to do an image of the elderly.

I love this because of the little faces you can see in the dried prunes, sadly the box says it is the property of the nursing home which alludes to how the elderly are (can be) treated in nursing homes.

I reused this in my english project to write a myth.

This also showed up in the cover of the book using black paint with silver pen for the stars.

This was an attempt to draw with perspective and light. Right before the lesson on perspective.

One day, it would be  interesting to revisit some of these lessons…

It’s good to see how far I’ve come and to appreciate my former self. This is why I love to keep a sketchbook because I can see my progress. This has been particularly interesting to me to see parts of what I’ve done in the past are actually still there coming out in different ways.