If you can do calligraphy, you can draw! Learning how to look, and enabling the right side of the brain can awaken drawing skills. We will produce some exciting finished pieces of work combining monoline calligraphy and drawing using interesting tools, sticks and ink.
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| left to right: Sue Cox, Rosalind Ebbrell, Kathy Taylor, Janice Spencer-Skeen, Jill Goodchild |
There is always a feeling of trepidation for someone who doesn’t feel confident about drawing, but as people suspend judgement and trust the process, they soon become totally absorbed in looking and begin to tune into the right side of the brain.
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| Patsy Kettle, Sophie Zie Carreras |
The intense concentration is palpable as people begin doing blind contour drawing – drawing where they are not looking at the paper, only at their hand as they move the pencil on paper at the same rate as study the contours of their hand. Blind contour drawings are often more exciting than drawings where the artist has looked at the paper!
Drawing an origami crane gives an opportunity to practise judging angles and drawing perspective.
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Top:Sue Cockburn and Kathy Taylor
Bottom: Pat Archer and Rosalind Ebbrell
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The tulip project was an interesting one as it raised several issues. The concept was to collage tulip shaped tissue in approximatley the right places and then to ignore this and draw the tulips using a kebab stick The background has a colour wash of cold tea.
However, we ran into a few difficulties.
Firstly the tulips had all drooped leaving us without a good focal point. Secondly the tulips themselves were small and the leaves were prolific, so it was difficult to “read” the drawing. Thirdly, we should have done a very basic structural outline in pencil to get the placement of the collage more accurate. In the end there wasn’t really a good place to add lettering. Nevertheless, there were some very good drawings and studies.
This is how the problem solving could have worked:
Keep some tulips fresher so that they don’t droop and add them to the droopy ones or ensure that the tulips have drooped then picked up their heads again (which was what I had hoped for and did not manange to control). Then imagining that this was a one or two day workshop devoted to the tulips only, the above drawings could be regarded as preliminary studies. Having done such a study, each person could have worked out a composition with lettering (words, style and placement) with a thumbnail sketch and then arranged the tulips and added the lettering.
Participants asked what style of lettering would suit this sort of drawing. Ben Shahn’s naïve versals* would have been good, but a more senstive style of stacked lettering would also look great.
Below is an example a strelitzia collage, with a possible solution for lettering.
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| Strelizia – Lin Kerr |
If the tulips had been drawn to one side with a straight leaf or stem to serve as a margin, with possibly one or two drooping tulips extending into the lettering area, there would be somewhere to add lettering. Of course this is only one solution and there are many.
And anyway, art is all about problem solving!
It was not possible to identify the artist of each piece of work, but the other participants were:
Viva Lloyd. Diane Groatley, Audrey Simmons, Janet Malcolm, Sarah Psaila, Janet Price
* Ben Shahn’s naïve lettering as well as the Principles of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain can be seen in ARTICLES 11th February 2011
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