After five days of COVID-19 quarantine, I was cleared to go back to teaching classes in person at Crealde. I tested negative for the virus and returned to the campus several days later. It was a nice morning so we sketched outside. I managed to completely forget my art supply bag, so instead I found a pencil in the summer camp supplies and sketched on a bit of table top paper. I didn’t have watercolors so I was only able to do line art.
The point of this class was to have students do a series of nine small thumbnail drawings to fill page. With the layout I suggested three thumbnail drawings would line up across three stacked lines. I decided to simply stitch three thumbnails together to create panoramas. I scanned the drawings back at my home studio and then finished them off as digital paintings.
My first piece of advice is always to stay in the shade since the Florida Sun can be brutal. Most of the students stayed on the back patio area which is covered. As the sketches progressed it gradually grew hotter. There are ceiling fans in the rafters of the back patio but I couldn’t figure out where the switch was. Several texts to colleagues finally uncovered the secret, the switch was in the art studio next to my classroom. The fans made a huge difference.
Some students however ventured out to other parts of the campus and one misjudged how much shade she had. I think she ended up in the direct sunlight and she returned to the classroom to finish her sketches in the air conditioning.
One student hunted down all the female nude sculptures around the property. I had never realized just how many nudes there were. As an urban sketcher it is very seldom that I will be sketching a nude. People tend to wear clothes at events in public. Yet the nude seems to be the predominant subject among the sculptures on property.
All of my students are women in this session at Crealde. That leaves me wondering why men don’t seem to have an interest in sketching. It is a real mystery.