The picture plane is the surface in space where your picture is waiting for your wits to grow sharper. Today, I sketched this in drawing class. It’s Queen Anne. The neighborhood has always let my eyes rest on it. It is truly cute and cozy-looking they way they are all nestled onto that hill.

In class exercises on ways of seeing, the focus being the negative space around objects. It’s a good lesson, focusing on shapes, abstracting them from their realities which we as lifelong seers have taken for granted. Annie Dillard wrote about how the blind that see at first are taken aback by how seeing is just a bunch of moving colored shapes. Claire (the drawing teacher) said that people with depth perception dysfunction are more equipped to translate the world onto paper.

This is Claire. I used to give my friends wacky hairdos during breaks in high school (both guys and girls). I didn’t do my teacher’s hair, but this gave me a huge nostalgia boner.