drawing class with Daniel O'Toole aka Ears

tonight I went to a drawing class with Daniel O'Toole aka Ears, a Sydney based painter and now video artist. Ears is one of my favourite Sydney artists and I'm lucky to have one of his paintings. now I can see how contour based his works are. the class was held at his studio called "Higher Ground Studio" in Leichardt & was lots of fun. we did some mark making exercises to different styles of music, drawing different words, blind contour drawings & contour drawings where we added shading/colours to the shapes, drawing by rubbing out the charcoal using putty rubber, making a variety of marks, drawing a landscape with our marks and we finished up with a collaborative painting of a brown, flattened box. I only had butchers paper instead of cartridge paper so some are a bit rough. we used mostly charcoal and ink with a touch of coloured house paint.

http://earstotheground.net is Ears' website. apart from amazing paintings, he has also uploaded some of his sketchbook pages which are pretty inspiring. some of the line/contour drawings remind me of Carla Sonheim's ones and class exercises where we try to draw animals. Ears draws faces — there's a lot of portraits with masks/faces in his paintings
http://earstotheground.net/Sketch-book

here's some photos of the class — my work plus the collaborative painting in different stages