Learning to See: Observational Drawing at Carleton

If you’ve been reading my blogs, you would know that last term, I had the pleasure of taking Observational Drawing at Carleton. All Carleton students are required to take one class that fulfills the Arts Practice requirement. As an Art History major, however, I’m required to take two Studio Art classes as part of my major requirements. I had done some art in high school, but always felt like I was lacking the formal training to really succeed. I figured that it would be best to build my skills from the bottom up at Carleton, and Studio Art 110 was a good place to start.

What I wasn’t entirely expecting was to fall head-over-heels in love with drawing. The class really did take a bottom-up approach, and I learned so much about how to interpret the world around me. Here are some of my favorite art pieces from the class, and what they taught me not just about drawing, but even about life.

Assignment #1: See the Space Between and Behind

The first assignment for Observational Drawing was to draw a precariously stacked stool, chair, and stick. The trick was that drawing the actual shapes was forbidden. We could only pay attention to the negative spaces that the objects created. It was a surprisingly difficult exercise, especially when the overlapping objects became more complicated. This assignment taught me to slow down when drawing and to always be attentive not just to the object at hand, but the environment that it sits in.

Assignment #2: See the Overlap

The second assignment in the class was to draw a type of super cluttered still life using only line. The trick here was to focus on scale and overlap as we drew. This assignment drove me absolutely crazy. It felt impossible to nail the complexities of 3D objects with only line, and it was hard to nail the scale and overlap because my head was constantly moving around. The assignment taught me to embrace the fact that these objects were still. It became easy once I realized that the form of the objects did actually change when I moved. It was an exercise in acknowledging that I will always have a perspective, and that it’s best to acknowledge that rather than try to conjure some sort of hyper-objective view.

Assignment #3: See the Light as Much as the Dark

This next assignment introduced value into our drawings by using both additive and subtractive terms. In non-art terms, that means drawing both with the charcoal and the eraser. This assignment introduced me to one of my current favorite ways of approaching a drawing. I loved the opportunity to try to see the same object two different ways: one formed by light and one by shadow. It taught me that every object has an intense dimensionality. It also reminded me that seeing the light in things is important, as demonstrated by my friend Lily sticking her tongue out in the back of this picture.

Assignment #4: See Personality

The next subject of the class was my absolute favorite- the unit on the figure. We spent weeks working with models (Carleton studio art majors!) who very kindly sat for our classes. It was a challenge to understand how to treat the model both with the same objective viewpoint that we had honed through drawing objects and portray their humanity. Through the process, I learned how to understand things objectively while also understanding their humanity: a nose is always just a nose, but it always belongs to a person. This juxtaposition is hard to wrap your head around until you’ve done it, another reason why everyone should take a drawing class at Carleton!

Assignment #5: See the World in Imaginative Color!

The last medium that we were introduced to in the class was colored pencils! And after months of working in black and white, it certainly was an adjustment. Our first assignment in color was to draw one fruit in six different color combinations. Our professor encouraged us to work not just from direct reference, as we did with the top two examples, but to imagine the fruit in multiple different colors. This assignment was an exercise in both careful observation and creative imagination. It was cool to break the form of a class that was so tied go observation by drawing something as absurd as a blue apple. It taught me that breaking out of the box is a great idea, especially when you’ve gotten super comfortable inside the box itself.

Emma (she/her/hers) is a sophomore Art History major/European Studies minor from Attleboro, Massachusetts. When she’s not in class, you can probably find Emma engrossed in a terribly long conversation in Burton Dining Hall, knitting at a Bald Spot picnic table, or perusing the museum studies stacks on third libe. Beyond blogging, she works for the Registrar’s Office, teaches adult tap dance classes downtown, and loves submitting to student publications like babyteeth and No Fidelity. She loves Carleton for the number of opportunities it offers and the close connections she’s formed with professors, not to mention proximity to coffee from Goodbye Blue Monday and early morning walks through the neighborhoods