Tremendous Trees

When you step into the entrance hall of the museum, volunteers hand you a slip of paper with the events of the day on them. I read through them and one caught my eye right off, Family Drawing Hour: Tremendous Trees. You signed up for a one-hour sketching class for age 7 and up. So I found the right location to sign up and put my name down. We met at the appointed location and everyone was handed their supplies, a cardboard backed pad of paper, a graphite pencil, a rubber and an eraser.

Audrey was the instructor, assisted by Kelly, who kept everyone supplied with sharp pencils. We were taken to one of the photo galleries that had a display of photographs of trees and plopped down on the floor. We did a warm up exercise where we drew and filled a sheet of paper with scribbles. The rubber was applied to blur and shade. Then we used the stretch eraser to remove and shade.

Then we were shown two ways of drawing trees, the line and the 'blob.' We each started two pictures based on a couple of pictures hanging on the wall. Both of them were pictures of trees in front of backdrops. After about 15 minutes we moved outside to the garden. We talked about using the different techniques and Audrey pointed to the various trees in the garden and we all were to pick a tree and try to draw it.

Audrey standing next to the tree I tried to draw. I need a lot more branches to make it look good. At the end of class she posed with me and one of my pictures. The painting of the bug in the back is pretty neat. You can see the insect pin that looks like it is holding the bug to the wall, it actually comes out of the wall.