Today in Sketching: Art for Art's Sake

So today was an odd day in sketching to say the least. I drew this on the back of my receipt at Panera's while having lunch with some of my class chums from animation class. The girl who took my order is a bit of an odd ball yet awkwardly pleasant. She is always overly eager to take your order and she leans her body (lead by her head) toward you when she asks questions. She did remember me though--she tagged me "the artist"--and after a briefly confusing conversation (which was purposefully confusing on my behalf) she comp'd me one free drink.

Then I have been drawing these creepy ogre-looking things (*note the green mistake in the last post). The one on the right was actually drawn fairly large on bigger paper. Why? I don't know...

Then it was off to life drawing for animation class!
It was another model-less day. So my instructor did some quick poses for us. Because the class needed the practice in drawing cargo-pants... Okay, joking aside, I give the man credit for really putting an effort out there to give us something to draw (I had an instructor once who made us take turns in modeling on the stand).

My instructor does get pretty inventive though. He ran out and grabbed a plastic tiger mask and a plastic pink flamingo (probably a lawn ornament--btw how were those ever popular???). Instead of drawing a man in a mask, I decided to transform him into an actual cat:
These were fun and I wished we did more of them, but all of a sudden, things took a turn for the weird.....

When we first walked into class, we were told to fill a page with random marks. Later were told to return to that page and were verbally handed a laundry list of things to do to it. It was like 20 minutes of creating abstract expressionism in a LIFE DRAWING class for ANIMATION! I mean who forces contemporary art onto people? WHO? Sometimes my instructor's fine arts background rears its head in class and just likes to ruin my day. There is a time and a place for that kind of stuff--really, I don't hate it--but seriously not when I am trying to work on my draftsmanship.

Then again, I wouldn't have made this masterpiece:
This is the image of my brain checking out.
We went back to gesturing right after. For our last drawing, he wanted us to create tension in the pose and gave us about 15 to 20 minutes with it:
I didn't even bother to get a clean paper and gave it about a minute of my time. I spent the rest of the class time making caricatures of some of my classmates (they were pretty mean exaggerations and didn't have much likeness of their respective subjects). The class had to turn our drawings around for everyone to see, as we occasionally do, and I clearly didn't spend as much time on it then the rest of the class. Hah!

I was having such a good day too! I was in bright spirits. Having a modest amount of social interaction with my peers. Cracking some jokes. But I felt the life just get sucked out of me in that class. Days without models are the longest.

Thursday we don't have a model. So we will be field-tripping to PetsMart for some cafe sketching. Except last time we went, it was one of the most stressful cafe skecthing I have ever experienced. I hope I don't get placed in front of the gold fish this time...

*FACEPALM*