Welcome Spring

This is Ana wishing you a happy Spring!

This past Sunday, and to welcome Spring along, three grown-up students of the Academy of Art of Highland Park (AAHP) joined me as the AAHP’s Chief Instructor, for a hike-and-sketch. We did so at the Sourlands Mountain Preserve, in Hillsborough, NJ.

This was an informal gathering featuring no instruction. Instead, we worked as peers. Sketching, which can be in color—or not—usually means brief artworks that are made mostly of lines, not so much shading. Tonal drawing, like our students do with us in studio, are made of mostly shading, and they take longer to make.

Below is a photo of my mixed-media sketch.
Media: pen and ink, dry graphite, and color wax pencil
Support: sketch paper (not drawing paper), bound in a field book
Technique: line drawing, scumbling, and light washes with brush pen.
Format: double-page in field sketch book. I used a format that’s almost like a long scroll. I did that on purpose. Can you think of why I chose to do use this double-page format?

It took me one hour to make the field sketch shown below, which is just as long as many students work in studio with us every week. It’s just that in studio we do work that takes a little more time to build, across days and weeks.

When an artist works anywhere outside his or her home studio, or other studio, it is called fieldwork. Any one artwork done as fieldwork can take seconds, or years!

We at the AAHP love doing fieldwork. The AAHP has a school for fieldwork called ArtVentures International (AI). We have worked with our teen and adult students in Africa, as well as in Puerto Rico, and across our tristate region here, closer to home.

Senior Instructor Aaron and I are hoping to again do a few local AI trips this year for all ages. I hope you get to join us sometime, so as to experience fieldwork, which is totally different from studio work! In the meantime, see you in studio!

Sincerely,
Ana Eloísa Soto-Canino
Chief Instructor AAHP