Section outline

  • Kia Ora 

    Welcome to Week 3

    WALT: We a going to be learning how to use our Visual Diary or Sketchbooks. We will also be exploring the process of Marbling to create textures this week.




    Benefits of a Sketchbook or Visual Journal Practice

    Keeping a daily sketchbook helps you to see and be present in the world. This artistic practice can also help you:

    • Grow and develop new ideas
    • Make connections and foster creativity
    • Improve your drawing ability and observational skills
    • Maintain and ignite inspiration
    • Experiment with new techniques and materials
    • Encourage happy accidents or those unforeseen and unplanned creative discoveries

    Tips for Keeping a Sketchbook or Visual Journal

    Don’t worry about making perfect pictures in your sketchbook—focus on practicing your skills, recording fleeting thoughts, and capturing moments of life. It's more about the process than the product. If you happen to create an exceptional composition, that's great, but that is not the goal. Keep your visual journal projects fun and fresh with the following ideas.

    • Mark up your pages ahead of time, so that you’re not facing completely blank white pages. Paint layers of color, draw lines, use a hole punch—anything to make them less precious, and enable you to be free with what you draw and create.
    • Notice everything around you. Nothing is too mundane to draw—your cup of coffee, the materials you’re using to draw with, squirrels at the park, a bike in a rack, or even a trash can.This is how you make your observational skills stronger. 
    • Don’t edit yourself. Spend no more than 10 minutes on a drawing and don't go back and erase. Instead, restate any lines that you'd like to change.
    • Try new materials. Don’t be stuck using the same old pencil. By all means, use it if that is all you have, but don’t be limited by it. Try different supplies, including forgotten markers and pens you may have lying around the house.
    • Try using an iPad, iPhone, or tablet. This is an interesting way of testing your sketching abilities in a fresh format. See David Hockney’s iPad Paintings. See how Jorge Colombo drew a New Yorker cover using the Brushes app in Cover Story: Finger Painting.
    • Use color. Don’t just stick to black and white. Alternatively, it can sometimes be helpful to give yourself specific parameters, like only using brown, red, and gold, to see what you can do within those limits.
    • Draw abstractly as well as representationally. Draw the same thing multiple times, becoming increasingly abstract with each drawing. Draw things up close so that they appear abstract, or draw small objects at a large-scale so that they go off the page and lose their context.
    • Take a line for a walk. Do one continuous line drawing of ten different objects. Keep your pencil on the paper as you draw and connect one item to the next.
    • Try a blind contour drawing. Look only at the subject and not down at your paper. It doesn't matter if the result looks like chicken scratch—this exercise will help you sharpen your observational skills. 
    • Keep your sketchbooks and date your drawings to record your progress and artistic development.

    Please watch the Marbling process video and document the process in your sketch book

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekrgY6RdYww