No, wait - Conte IS Charcoal and a Published Drawing

Continuing the belated Spring 2013 Fiber Arts Degree posts:

After portraiture, the drawing class moved onto... Landscape!

Yep and I knew as much about that as I did about any other drawing topic. {wry grin}

And by then I had learned the teacher would send us off with a "draw this" experimentation vibe and after we gave it a shot he'd give us some instruction and we'd move forward.
So, when he sent us off to find some landscape and draw it...I just gave it a wild shot.
{S'ok, laugh if you need to}.

Sadly, my landscape skills didn't improve much even after instruction...it boggled me.

 

We were assigned to do a couple of smallish landscape drawings with Conte Crayons.
{sigh} I totally spaced that conte really is charcoal and I could have applied my semi-experience with Charcoal drawing but I did this instead. Ah, well.

I was pleased with the shading I did on the
top bricks...but otherwise...{sigh}

Moving on...

A side project was offered to the drawing classes to create a drawing to go with the winning short stories from the college writing contest. The highlight of that day - one of my classmates, a young lady who draws beautifully, found out her story had been one of the winning entries selected because it was in the pile of stories offered for us to review. She was so delighted! What a smile!

The instructor urged us to pick one of the winning entries and try creating an illustration to go with the story.
I knew it was a stretch for me and I was also aware that there were many other folks that could really draw and do a much better job on the art than I would. I made the teacher promise to offer the story I selected to other drawing students so my writer would have drawing options for his story.

I chose a story about a teacher making a regular visit to a prison to support the educational pursuits of the inmates. My drawing attempts were inspired by the description of the teacher's observations about the prison grounds, the student-inmates' desire to learn and how the students interact and support each other in the classroom, discarding prison pressures and prejudices away from the eyes of the other inmates.

Trying to draw barbed wire and razor wire with a
butterfly as one of the blades.

Trying to draw a book with razor wire book mark. 

Although I'm pretty sure they published all the drawings that were submitted, I was still very pleased that my drawing was included in the 2013 East Campus Writing Contest publication.

This is the drawing I submitted. An open book with a razor-wire bookmark casting a shadow of a butterfly.
Learning. Prison. The hope of metamorphosis.

I think education can change lives.
Blessings be.