Charcoal is the New Black

In my drawing class we had our first critique of the semester. We drew a still life (which you can view on the Wednesday, September 5th post) in class and then we had it critiqued the following week. All of our drawings were pinned to the gigantic push-pin-board-wall, I don't know what you really call those, and then there was a number placed by each one. I was number 5 :) I just like that number because there are five kids in my family, five fingers on a hand, five members on the court for a basketball team, five days in the week...oh the list could go on forever. Yeah, five is just a good number. Anyway, after the drawings were numbered to retain anonymity we each received a number from our teacher and we had to critique the drawing that matched it. I'm glad we had time to write good critiques, because I always have a lot to say and sometimes there isn't enough time. After we finished and handed in our written critiques, we critiqued each piece as a class and for each drawing critiqued the artist was revealed.

Some would think that a critique is an awful thing because people criticize your work and say awful things about it. But in reality, they don't say awful things they just speak the truth as to what can be improved so that the student can more effectively accomplish the purpose of the drawing assignment. Mind you, they do address the things that you did well in the drawing, but the constructive criticism is always there. For this project we had to use charcoal and work on tones and if you didn't really get that concept down, you just received more useful information to utilize in your next piece. Personally I think critiques at school are great because they provide learning opportunities for you and your classmates. After learning about where you could improve,  you start to "see" like an artist. It was super cool to see how I could make my drawing more realistic by simply adding or subtracting more value in certain spots that I didn't see when I first drew them.

I won't include a picture of my drawing because it's already been posted, but I will post some funny comics that I found about art critiques: