Free Draw!
Messing around is the best medicine
UPCOMING:
Summer Visiting Artists! I’ll be stepping away in August to focus on a project. While I’m gone, I’m passing the pencil to some incredible visiting artists: the brilliant Amy Tan, Gretchen Rubin,
(and more!) These creative superheroes will each share a favorite lesson of theirs and special drawing assignment they created just for us. We kick off next week with Gretchen, and I’ll pop into the chat to say hi and check out all of your drawings. Have a great time with our Summer Visiting Artists!Helllooo DrawTogether Grown-Ups Table friends and fam.
First off, I loved seeing everyone’s responses to my piece on Hockney and drawing outdoors. The show & tell of your 100+ personalized field kits in the chat are beyond inspiring: the smart ways we customize our set ups, how we deal with paint water, all our unusual brushes, markers and pencils there are to use, and the constraints we give ourselves (“everything must fit into the pouch!”) If you haven’t shared your own plein air set up yet, head over to the chat and post a photo. I’ve also featured a few more in our GUT Gallery at the end of this dispatch. (Welcome new sharers!) If you are not an outdoor drawer yet, this is your chance.
This week: Play
After all the deep dives we did into graphite and then the reflection we did on plein air, this weekend my body really needed to draw. Not read about drawing or write about drawing. Not make anything productive out of it. Just Draw. I felt like I needed to play.
So I listened to my body, and that is exactly what I did. And that is what we are doing this week.
I have some beautiful flowers in my house right now. If you have been a member of the GUT for a while, you know I love to draw flowers. I decided I’d put aside the nagging voice in my head of the hundred things I “need” to do, and gave myself permission to stop all the work I was doing and just draw flowers for a day. The world would not end if I didn’t get everything I needed to do done.
I don’t operate well without constraints, so I gave myself some:
Constraints:
Draw the same subject from different angles
Draw them in them different sizes
Play with different mediums
And it was the best day I’ve had in a really long time.
I'm lucky to be able to carve out a whole day to draw, but a dedicated hour or two would have offered the same experience. After the first 10 minutes, I got into the flow. Time disappeared. All these thoughts and feelings that have been darting around inside me had a chance to surface. I sat with them. Drew threw them. At the end of the quiet1, concentrated drawing session/day, I felt calmer, less stressed, more centered and focused, and just generally more in touch with my self than I have in a long while. Bonus: I had created an unexpected stack of drawings!
So why does drawing for play feel so different?
HERE IS WHERE I WOULD USUALLY GO INTO RESEARCH/WRITING MODE AND SHARE A BUNCH OF STUDIES ABOUT PLAY. BUT NOT THIS WEEK!! This week we’re focusing on the drawing for the sake of drawing. I am going to share with you the flower drawings I did (using those constraints I mentioned above.) I am also going to show them to you in the order in which I did them so you can see how my drawings (and I) evolved over the course of the drawing session, how I pushed myself in new directions and how it worked out.
Drawing for the sake of drawing
Wendy’s Free Draw: Flowers.
First drawing: Using a standard size sketchbook and a chunky graphite pencil, I started way out on the left and worked my way in. This was a good warm up drawing for me, helping me get out of my head, let go of expectations of doing a “good drawing” and I really started to look closely and see all the shapes and textures. It takes a little time to warm up. This was probably 15 minutes.
Second drawing: For some reason, I felt like the pencil lines were begging to be painted, but opaque. So I created portraits of some of the flower characters, first drawing them in pencil, and then going in with gouache. I never use gouache. I only have about ten tubes, so my palette was limited and I got very frustrated very quickly. I HATED how this was turning out. The paint wasn’t doing on the page what I saw in my head. I reminded myself I have not used gouache in probably 10 years, and that it’s a skill, like anything else. I gave myself permission to just mess around and if I want to get back into it, I can practice more. The result is tight and kind of dead looking and self-conscious. To me, at least. It probably took an hour.
Third Drawing(s): After the discomfort and tightness of that experience, I wanted to loosen up and get back into my body and more lively looking again, and I thought about Hockney’s accordion fold (or “concertina”, more properly) sketch book that helped him look closely at his landscape, and how loose and free that felt. So I went over to my giant sketchbook and cut out a strip and folded it into a concertina and used that to make a looser study of the different flowers and plants in the bouquet, using a bunch of different mediums (pencil ,pen, gouache, ink, colored pencil.) Here is the front, and back:
Fourth Drawing(s): Since I’d pulled out my ink and felt loose again, I dipped my brush in the ink and just messed around doing some larger contour drawings. I did a few of these, and they each took a minute or two:
Fifth Drawing: I loved the feeling of the ink so much, it made me want to push beyond contour drawing and use color, so I challenged myself to draw just the positive shapes. From drawing the gouache portraits and the concertina before, I knew I loved the thistle’s shape the most, with its contrasts or round and sharp. So I did them in three colors: first peacock (let it dry), then carmine (let it dry), then golden yellow (the end.)
Sixth Drawing(s): I enjoyed twisting the brush and moving around the ink - and I wanted to make another little concertina book - so I cut another strip of paper out of my giant sketchbook, folded it up, and drew a little book of thistles: Ink on one side, and my classic pen and watercolor on the other. New technique and old technique, back to back.
Then I went to sleep.
This morning, I woke up, made coffee, and sat down to draw one more flower drawing. I used the same medium I started with yesterday, this time in a slightly smaller sketchbook. I felt relaxed, loose, and more in sync not only with my medium, but with the flowers themselves. Drawing the flowers this AM felt like having coffee with a friend.
Free Play, Free Draw. Flowers. I feel so much better.
Alright, YOUR TURN. Here are this week’s Free Draw instructions: