Drawing our feathered friends
This past session, we studied drawing and painting birds. Although I've taught this subject before, I found this time around, I actually learned more than I taught. Part of the reason why is I again returned to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology anatomy page. As you can see in the screen shot shown below, this interactive page helps you learn the different parts of a bird, including the skeleton.
While I don't consider myself an expert at drawing and painting birds, I did find that this site helped a great deal by giving me a deeper understanding at how everything works. Click on the above link to see how interesting the site can be.
We also covered some amazing artists this session (I always highlight an artist each week). Especially interesting is Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), who is famous for his serial paintings. One in particular is The Four Elements: Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. (He also created a series called, The Four Seasons). In our class we were interested in his use of birds in the Air panting. Granted, it's a little different because his whole portrait is made up of birds. Just incredible.
Air by Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Lastly, after spending four weeks of drawing/painting birds, we ended with breaking all the rules and going with an abstraction/cartoon-like drawings the last week. It was fun. Here's an example of some fun characters.
A great project created by student Darlene Van Luvanee:
Just having some fun.
I really enjoyed this session and am looking forward to our next session, which begin April 9th. See below for details!