Learning to draw, learning to see

Hi everyone!  Welcome to See*Draw*Quilt*Learn, a blog about learning to draw, which really means learning to see what is in front of you, then rendering it on paper, in cloth, in clay, you pick your favorite medium.  This all began with a post on my blog and to the QuiltArt list, sharing that I had actually, and to my utter astonishment, been able to teach myself drawing.  Diana Feit left a comment saying that folks online could help with comments and suggestions, which led to me asking on the QuiltArt list if anyone would be interested, which led to a flood of messages!  The result?  This blog!

Here’s what I envision…and that can surely change:  Those of us who want to learn to draw, can begin by working through Betty Edwards’ The New Drawing on the Right Hand Side of the Brain together, sharing comments, questions, asking for feedback.  If you like, you can also buy the companion workbook, both of which are available from Amazon.com (click on the titles in this paragraph for direct links); total cost at Amazon for both books is a modest US$ 24!  We can then post to our own blogs a complete post about our progress.  Then, we can post a quick note here, with a hotlink back to our own blogs.  If you don’t have your own blog, you can post here.  And if you learn of another good “learn to see/draw” resource, by all means add it and include your progress!

So how do you post here?  Write me and ask to be a contributor, and I will add you.  I expect good internet netiquette, and would like the posts here to stay rigorously on-topic, which means art-related, with at least a tenuous link to drawing (you can do the other blogging stuff on your own blogs).  I’ll set up a category for each person, plus add link in the blogroll to each contributor’s “home blog” / online photo album.  As time goes on, we can decide together what “categories” we need.  I’m thinking of setting up Categories for each chapter, so if you want to see how someone else approached, say, the sketch of a street scene, you can search on that category and find all the related posts.  That means contributors will need to remember to check the correct boxes when preparing their posts!

For a while, I can help those new to blogging navigate how to post to the blog.  You’ll  need a computer, the willingness to learn, a digital camera to take pictures to share, and know how to use the software on your computer to re-size the photo; since this is a free site, we have a limited amount of storage, so I will be asking everyone to size their photos to a maximum of 400 pixels wide.  If you set the resolution to 72, and picture width to 400, you still get a pretty sharp image on the screen.

A note about the header:  Instead of using the plain ol’ vanilla template provided by WordPress, I selected a template that is crisp and clean looking (to better set off our improving skills), and a customizable header.  For now, I have uploaded a section of one of my most recent quilts, a small-ish (20 inches or so wide) wholecloth quilt that is, essentially, drawing with a needle.  I think it might be fun to switch this out every so often with different works by contributors.  What do you think?

OK…that’s it for now!   Just write to me and let me know if you’d like to join in the fun!