I am pleased to announce some more classes at the Kits Community Centre – a 6-week version of my beginner’s drawing course (shortened for summer) and a new tone and shading course. For descriptions and registration info, please click here.

Several students have asked me about shading, how to create depth in their drawings, why are we only doing outlines, etc….so now I have a shading course starting July 5th. It is a 6-week course as well so it will be more of an intro to shading. We will work from still-life setups as well as reference material, using charcoal and pencil. I do recommend that you have a solid foundation in drawing as I won’t spend too much time going over drawing skills in this course. For anyone who has taken my beginner’s drawing course – you are prepared enough for this!

In other news, I did end up going to Basic Inquiry 3 Friday nights in a row, and managed to create a little painting which I quite like. I will eventually take a picture and post it. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience – it has been a while since I’ve painting and I forgot how the time just flies by. Who knows, I might become a Friday night regular…

One more thing – I have added an RSS feed link to the side of my blog here. I use Google Reader to keep track of all the blogs I read, so RSS feeds are a mystery to me. Please let me know if it works or not. My blog is the best place to find out about new classes and other updates so it is worth following (and since I obviously don’t post too often, I won’t be clogging up your feeds!

I went to a seminar called “Navigating the Art Industry” last night, presented by Pennylane Shen of Phantoms in the Front Yard yesterday at Jacana Gallery. It was very interesting – seemed mainly geared towards emerging artists looking for representation in commercial galleries, though there was some info about public galleries as well (which doesn’t interest me too much anyways…). I thought it well presented, she obviously is highly qualified and knew what she was talking about. What I enjoyed was the no-nonsense tone and that it seemed to confirm a lot that I already had suspicions about. I remember when I was managing Rothwell Gallery in Ottawa, it was always appreciated when artists submitting their work followed the guidelines I had posted on the website. Hearing Pennylane set out some standards for artists was refreshing.

I also attended Jay Senetchko‘s vernissage at Ian Tan Gallery on Saturday afternoon. Well-attended reception! Nice seeing his work in person, I don’t think I have before. Ran into a couple people I knew and just enjoyed the general atmosphere.

In other news, I am planning to be at Basic Inquiry for the next 3 Friday nights to start and hopefully complete a painting…3 consecutive Fridays is a challenge for me so we will see how that goes…

I added a couple new pieces to the portfolio page – an ink painting of a ship at sea, approx. 24″ x 30″, and a 3-hour conte portrait study I did at Basic Inquiry, on 19″ x 25″ grey paper.  I’m pretty happy with the way they both turned out!  The ink painting is on beautiful Arches watercolour paper, with nice textured edges, and was done over the course of a couple months, working on it sporadically.  Check them out here.

Tomorrow is the first day of the beginner’s drawing class at the Kits Community Centre!  Looks like we have a full house and I’m looking forward to meeting everyone.  For those on the waiting list – stay tuned for upcoming group classes – they’re in the works!