Artful Play - Makin' a Mess

Last night was week two in my six-week series: Artful Play. It is being held at the Salem Art Association, which is nestled in Bush's Pasture Park (I wrote about SAA and the location last week, so click here if you want a direct link to that post). Since Howard is my wonderful art supply schlepper, we arrived early and ate our dinner in the park at a picnic table just outside the studio. After I got the room set up, I played around with my supplies outside.




We started the evening by doing a little blind contour drawing. In blind contour drawing, you keep your eyes on the object you are drawing, never looking down at your paper (oh, and you also can't lift your pen or pencil). It's tricky. We started by drawing the jester featured in the flowerbed above, moved to a self-portrait, then drew each other. All of these ideas were created by Gretchin Lair of Scarlet Star Studios in Portland and I loved them so much, that I have incorporated them into this class. I didn't take photos of the first two rounds of drawings, but did manage a shot of the drawings they did of each other. They are playful and fun.

After our series of blind contour drawings, we moved into Touch Drawing. This is a technique developed by Deborah Koff-Chapin (those are Deborah's Soul Cards sprinkled on the table in the photos showing our work space - Soul Cards were created from Deborah's touch drawings). I had the privilege of taking a one-day workshop with Deborah back in February, so it was fun to teach her methods after having heard her speak directly about the process (and to spend an entire day creating images myself).

One of my favorite things is images of hands doing art. Here are the ladies immersed in the Touch Drawing process.

Beautiful, beautiful pages of drawings, images, and color. This is a very small sampling of their work.