Dancing in the... daylight?

Yesterday was a very interesting drawing class. For the past 4 sessions we've been drawing models and the human figure, like it was our job. I think by the time that yesterday's class rolled along we were all kind of sick of doing the same thing. But little did we know a quater of the way into class that John and Allan had something planned for us.

When drawing you usually use your dominant hand, no? Okay, so we'd been doing that. We tested the waters of drawing with our non dominant hand... lets just say we've seen some better work. Also, when drawing you tend to use your wrist and move it along with your forearm and fingers. Well, John and Allan came up with a creative method to get us thinking and drawing in a different way.

Firstly, we were drawing only by moving from the elbow. A lot of the strokes were turning out rounded because we weren't told that we could move our wrists. The second was by isolating the shoulders and drawing only from the shoulders. By this meaning moving your upper body at the shoulders to create line and depth. Some of us fashioned a Britney Spears shimmy as our method while others used the push and pull from each to get through the exercise. The most noteable and third part of our experiment was attatching our arm at our side and moving from the hips to draw. (Sidenote: Along with drawing we had latin salsa music playing in the background to help get us going.) A guy in my class, O'Neil had the funniest way of drawing. He squatted down a little bit and just started going after it. This made the whole class burst into laughter which got the energy flowing through the room.

I think that it's safe to say that we were all a little bit airy and loosened up when it came to continue drawing regulary.

Good work guys, mission accomplished.