Beautiful friend, the end

This is from the final session of my drawing class. We played with chalk pastels. I now love this medium. This drawing here was literally my very first stab at it. I was shocked at how easily I was able to come out with something I liked. Definitely going to have to revisit this and see where I can go.

So my class is now over. I really enjoyed it and I think I really benefited from it. I'd like to see what I do on my own for a bit, but I'm likely to seek out more instruction at some point. I actually wouldn't mind taking more from the same instructor. The consistency would be nice. It's funny, though, I don't like the style of her pieces. But I think that may be a good thing. It'll prevent me from mimicking and rather force me to focus on using the techniques to create my own style. The contrast will do me good.

My wife asked me an interesting question when I showed this to her. "Do you consider any of these sketches 'art', or is it just messing around?" My answer? Who the hell knows. I mean, this is just a crappy newsprint sketch pad, and I'm just sketching things to work on one or two particular techniques, I'm not trying to make any sort of finished product. Plus, most of the source material used during class was magazine ads (this, for example, was for some diet food or fitness water or something), so it's not like these things are particularly meaningful.

That said, I don't think there's a clean line that can be drawn (so to speak) between "art" and "not art". A drawing like this definitely has some artistic value. At the very least, it imparts a certain amount of information about my style and abilities. The sketch pad as a whole is a record of my slow learning process, which has artistic value. There's nothing in there that I spent enough time on to call a completed work, but there are things in there that I will surely reference and that will inform anything I do make from here forward. So in that sense, yes I do consider it "art".