This week’s art experience is definitely one of my favorite experiences throughout the whole semester. I’ve been to the Japanese Gardens here in CSULB once before, but this time felt like an all new experience to me. When I first arrived in the gardens, it was cool seeing a lot of people (our class essentially) just sitting down and drawing. To me, it definitely felt like a calm and peaceful environment to just pick a place and truly appreciate nature. Thankfully it wasn’t too hot, but I enjoyed myself following the steps to create these sketches.
I believe the hardest challenge was to not erase in all of my sketches. Normally, when drawing, I ALWAYS tend to use the eraser to fix my mistakes. This time, however, when I made a mistake it took a little more effort covering it up. Overall, I feel a lot of my time sketching and drawing was focused on a single area of the sketch rather than the whole environment I saw. This especially held true for contour drawing; my first attempt was absolutely horrible! It was hard for me to draw according to what my eyes saw while not looking at the paper. Many times the image simply did not work out because the dimensions were entirely wrong!
In the end, I had a great time drawing in the Japanese gardens. It was definitely a treat witnessing such a beautiful environment here on campus and was a nice change rather than simply having class at the room. Overall, I loved it!
Aenah Ramones 