Learning is a light ... Part 1.

      Now I want to tell about my way to improve my painting skills. Maybe someone who thinks that he or she is absolutely incapable to draw, like I did, would see that it's really possible. Yes, I've finally decided to learn some theoretical drawing aspects. Of course, this was not a long-term arts education with daily hand trainings and intimate knowledge of the technical and theoretical nuances. But this was quite enough to do better than some "masterpieces" like my first picture that I am publish here just for "memory" and for fun.
      Some time ago my friends advised me a course at the Bauman Moscow State Technical University training center.  I've chosen the course "Drawing. Step 1" as a first stage of training, because I needed to learn some necessary elements: form proportions, light and shade, perspective, texture, and other things. Almost all of them were really new and useful for me. I had (and I have now) a wonderful teacher - an artist Vyacheslav Ashikhin who gave us so much  positivity and self-reliance (besides knowlege). He taught us to look at each work from different sides not just "like - not like", to open up our minds and to avoid stamps and frameworks.
     In general, I have a lot of positive emotions, but it's time to finish scribbling and show what I've done.

   So, this is the first "test pattern" from the first lesson. And I was really proud of it: what a reversal of a head, glare in the eyes ...). It does not matter that the head didn't fit the list, because I began to draw a nose first ... And yes, this is a self-portrait. Who saw me in life will understand the fun :)

And this was an interesting task to finish hats of varying textures (stone, fur, wood and metal). Yes, the fur hat is quite narrow, but if you have a soft head you can wear it :). 

We've drawn a lot of compositions with vases, geometric shapes, etc. during our lessons. This one was made by a hard pencil:

And I've copied this from a black and white picture:

The most difficult thing was to draw portraits because y could do everything academically right, but you fail if your picture doesn't look as the model.
This is the portrait of my son, it's turned out not quite like him.

 

And this is my daughter's portrait,  it's turned out more closely to the original.

Another interesting task was to paint a landscape as a copy from a color picture. I didn't believ that  this is possible when you have only a pencil. But all I could was to sit down (of course, in panic - how to do it??!) and start to draw. And four hours later, as you see, something began to appear.
So, here is my landscape homework.
A source:   

 5 hours later:

And this is an interesting sample of a coal drawing. The task was draw the same landscape in 10 minutes with a piese of coal. 

That was a month of a continuous drawing, and after that I was so glad don't have any homeworks and not to draw and draw again .... But not for so long: I'm at the next step: the course "Basics of Painting." I am sure that pretty soon  I'll have some works to share.