artist friends...

 

and those who consider themselves artists: 

                       if art teachers now or in the future were to base a lesson on you and your work, what would you want us to focus on?

for real, answer this!
it would be even more cool to teach a lesson and be able to skype with the artist!

 

if this were me, and I taught high school, I would teach a lesson focused on mark making with charcoal. I heavily relied on line in college drawing classes. I know there are other ways to make drawings, but this is what made sense to me.

And if I were to teach about... me... mark making and using lines to create value would be would be my focus.

I love to tell my student that I did NOT feel comfortable drawing faces until my junior year of college.  I voluntarily took 6 hour drawing classes on Friday afternoons because I loved putting on my headphones, focusing on the model and doing nothing but drawing, that much. Seriously, drawing classes were my electives as an art education major with a concentration in textile design. 

It wasn't until Daniel Ludwig came to a drawing class as a guest speaker, and husband of my professor, Anne Leone, that I realized there were BONES under that face and figured out how to make the muscles and skin appear like they were attached to the structure underneath. And that was it... attaching the muscles and skin to the structure underneath. I tell my middle school students now that its okay to start with a stick figure as long as its a stick figure with joints and that we attach some more information from there.

Between that and using my eraser as a drawing tool: starting with a medium tone and building or extracting from there... that would be my focus if I were to teach about me.
But what if I were to teach about YOU?

What elements, principles, techniques, process or ideas could I talk about?