yesterday's joys

Yesterday Brad Holland, one of my illustration heroes, lectured again at VCU, and though I arrived late and missed his opening remarks I assume he was stressing the importance of drawing because what he was showing in slide after slide were pages from his sketchbooks. There's no way I can convey how stunningly beautiful those pages were other then to say I'm still reeling from the sight of them, executed mostly in charcoal, he drew eveything and constantly, and what he didn't catch he drew perfectly from memory, from a moment's glance he had it and it was there on the page! It was an amazing thing to see, you could see how tremendously inspiring he was as students were suddenlly pulling out their sketchbooks and scribbling away, me too, the result of which is my poor likeness of him in the top sketch.

And then later, as my figure drawing class is now over, I met for the first time with a drawing group I discovered that meets weekly, so yay, I'll be able to continue studying the figure though now I'm on my own for seeing and correcting my mistakes. It was a fun evening, the bottom sketch is the result of the long study, though I did it twice, so maybe 45 minutes on that one.