Art at Cashmere

By Ben

One of my options (electives) in school right now is Art. I didn’t really know what I was in for, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. So far, I’ve completed two major units and I am halfway through another. The first unit that I did was a simple section on drawing paper curls. I first drew it with pencil, three different ways (Cross-Hatching, Negative Space and Expressive Line). In the fourth box I combined all of the views into a final pencil drawing. The next step was to draw a full A3 size (~11" x 17") paper curl with oil pastels. They are a bit like crayons, but higher quality and you can do lots of layering. We drew a light outline in white pastel, and built on that. Next we did the background, focusing on the shadows.

The next unit the class did was painting. I was given a sheet with four spectacular pictures of the sky that the art teacher took herself. We learned how to mix colour, and some other painting techniques. We completed painting the first two images, and were told to choose one of the final two images to create with impasto gel, a substance we added to the paint to give it a glossier, thicker texture. It turned out to be really hard to use, and my third painting was probably the worst. After everybody had finished their three paintings (taking about 5-6 days), we were told to choose our best painting and glue it into our portfolio books.

The other two we were to cut up and combine by “gridding” them. The teacher had some pretty cool ideas, like leaving one whole and cutting the other into circles and gluing them down in the same positions so that you could still see both skies, to a point. The teacher also had some stencils, and I found a neat turtle one. I cut my third painting into the shape of the stencil and glued the turtle together. There was still a good deal of room on the page, so I added another turtle and some waves.
I am currently working on a landscape print unit. The teacher gave us homework to copy a Van Gogh sketch of some fields, and in class we are working on a charcoal drawing of a landscape. I think the charcoal is really fun to work with and that this unit will be a lot of fun.