Session 01 – The Sketch book

 

What’s in the box?

Sketchpad – Pritt Stick - Drawing set - Coloured pencils – Habits of Mind Spidergrams

 

Welcome/Croeso to week 01 of the Feel Good Box sessions. Genuinely excited to be creative practices with you all. I am an experienced artist of over 30 years…but I only know now how much I don’t know about art…so I intend to learn as much as I share. This week is all about what a sketch book should/could be and also a look at what being creative actually means.

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Mood Board

This is just a way to free us up and art to move away from conventional representational mark making to find new  ways of 'approaching ' and blank canvas and gathering our muse.

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Simply scour the house for any printed material that you can tear up and stick onto the page - be guided by your gut reactions and do not contemplate too much  - art may be that you are guided by the colour or the image or the text and then start placing them together on the sheet to create new relationships of ideas and content. Simply rip out bits of newspapers – magazines – chocolate wrappers – etc and sick them in – rip up lots of coloured images and create a stock pile of coloured paper mosaic pieces – tear out bold print and headlines – create verse from random words torn from magazines - find naturally occurring dyes and stencils – coffee cup rings – tea bags

 

So, what is a Sketch book?  

Sketch = a rough drawing representing the chief features of an object or scene and often made as a preliminary study…

Book = something that yields knowledge or understanding…

 

So, in our case we are looking at a book of blank pages that are waiting to absorb your thoughts and ideas – whatever they are and however they appear in whatever medium or format. Your sketch book may in its time find itself holding a beautifully drawn picture…that’s OK but it is not the purpose of the sketch book. This is a space for you to make marks – stick in scraps of found objects – scrawl words – notes - lyrics – print – rip – glue – stain etc. It is a sponge to absorb the creative flow whenever that occurs – so the sketch book needs to be your closest companion – closer than your smart device! It needs to be available 24/7 and be able to record what’s on your mind and also provide you with information to further that idea into its next phase - whether that be a painting – poem – song – film scene – animation…

 

So, where to start?

Not on the first page – anywhere but on the first page – back to front – upside down – find and created sections at random – life is not an ordered timeline narrative from A-B our lives are the past present and future all happening at the same time in the life cinema of our minds.

 

As the late great David Bowie once said:

‘I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.’

 

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