Tracey Hewitt Mixed Media Art

Last week, I spent a wonderful five days at the McGregor Winter School, in Toowoomba, attending a drawing workshop with the very talented artist and teacher, Deb Gilmartin. By the end of the week, I was able to render this eye...which was thrilling! My precious prince Keelan was convinced that I had traced it...took some persuading to convince him that I had, in fact done it freehand! And that is testament to Deb's great teaching skills. I haven't drawn in years, and while the high school art class drawings I did all those years ago were passable, I have lately felt the lack of satisfactory skill and technique in the sketching arena.

A week with Deb and I think that's cured. She taught a dozen of us a number of 'tools' to use to get our drawings down in a manner with which we were happy. The class was titled: Learning to Draw and See as an Artist, and Deb used a lot of theory from Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, and Drawing with your Artist's Brain by Carl Purcell to help us get our right brains in gear...we drew blind contours - studying our subject, drawing without actually looking at our page; and we copied a sketch - upside down! Deb taught us to see angles and measure relative distances and to 'see'...which is more revolutionary than it sounds! The greatest revelation of the week was that what we 'know' we see, or 'think' we see isn't always what is really in front of us. The simple act of concentrating on an object for long enough to draw it's details gives you a whole new understanding of that object.

Do you suppose that could be true for husbands, too? If only I could keep him still long enough to draw him....