Building An Idea – Part 1

At the end of last semester, the drawing teacher gave us some homework. I frankly didn’t understand what he intended to do and he said he did that on purpose. The task was to do 4 or 5 rapid drawings every day of the Xmas break in order to have between 40 and 60 to play with in the new semester.

They were loosely and thematically prompted as follows: dreams, imaginary things, imaginary places, real things, real places. We were to prepare a batch of small sketch papers (about 4″ x 6″) upon which we would write the prompts, shuffle the lot, pile them and then just take them as they came and draw on them. Again, being frank, I wasn’t very motivated to do any of this.

I realized quickly once we entered the first class of the new semester, that our clever teacher had method to his madness and must have known that most of us would do half -assed jobs of the work. Regardless, we each had a lot to play with for the next step.

We started categorizing them and adding labels of our own definitions. Then we connected them to directed categories and displayed our work around those categories. As usual, the effect of connection with classmates was unexpected and fun. The next steps in this semester long build up will follow weekly. For this week, I’m sharing this in two posts.

1st – the images I didn’t like (because I clearly didn’t care enough when drawing them.)

2nd – the drawings I liked (to varying degrees).

Disclosure: I’d like to apologize for any similarities to known works (they might be yours, my dear fellow artists), but I won’t. My mind is a constant jumble of inspirations and I borrow liberally from that melting pot. However, should you see something you recognize, I invite to to cite the source and I will gladly publish the citation.