"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when he grows up" -Picasso. "Every child is an artist". Printed and laminated in colourful letters in school art rooms around the globe. And some of those art rooms will also be decorated with lovely anchor charts and rubrics - you can go check 'em out on Pinterest - carefully instructing the children (who are already artists, according to Picasso) how to do it right. One of my (not!) favourites is the rubric insisting that kindergarten children should use "colours that make sense"! (Suns are yellow apparently and trees are green and brown, not purple with pink spots and blue stripes).
That's the solution to the Picasso Problem. Permission to PLAY! It works for responsible adults too. Want to step up your own creativity, activate the happy, healthy endorphins, give the muscle between your ears a valuable work-out, give your worn-out grown up mind some necessary R&R - give yourself permission to play. Diarise it or Google Calendar it, if you must be all grown-up and schedule-y. But just do it. For the fun of it. Because it's good for you. Play is something you should definitely take seriously! You know there's loads of research. This one's a good place to start “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” - Kurt Vonnegut. So what's next? Ready to play? Check out my previous "Snap Happy" post for some ideas or just grab some crayons and get started. Yes, crayons. They're not just for kids. Permission to play, remember? Just have fun with it. More about crayons next time. Meanwhile, in the tradition of Eric Carle (and Franz Marc) on a scrap of Kraft paper, here's Skippy in Blue!
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"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera." -Dorothea Lange. "Learning to draw is learning to see" - Betty Edwards. Photo - graphy. Light drawing. From the Greek. There you go. (In the spirit of Gus Portakalos from My Big Fat Greek Wedding).
Dorothea Lange was a photo-journalist, passionate about social justice. She used her camera to "teach people to see" what was happening in their world, and to inspire change. Her words quoted at the beginning of this post open so many blogs, articles and reflections that it's running a perilous risk of cliche, to use them again. However, I'll let them stand, since this blog is dedicated to "learning to see" and to accessing innate creativity - who knows what might change when we tap into that potential!
But your main HOMEWORK for this week, (yes, I did say "homework", don't make me use my teacher voice!) is: 1) Get out and take photographs. Look for new perspectives. Crop and edit and play with them if you wish. Just have fun with it! 2) Look at what other people are snapping. Find some photography to follow on social media. Don't think about (or Google) what gear the pros are using, just look at the images and consider the compositions that appeal to you. Photo challenge accounts on Instagram are a fantastic resource. You might like to jump in and join the current challenges or just follow and observe. (We'll talk more about challenges in future posts...stay tuned!). Make sure you look at their hashtags too, so that you can see a range of participants, not just the featured few. Highly recommend the @fms.photoaday account - a longstanding challenge initiated by Chantelle Ellem who blogs as Fat Mum Slim (Find participants with the hashtag #FMSPAD). Also follow @it's_my_week, new theme and new hashtags every week.
Have questions? Feel like a chat? Jump into the comments here (but please be aware that comments are moderated, so if your comment doesn't appear immediately, I might be sleeping, or painting, or out taking photos. I will get it it ASAP. Also find me @LightSplashes on Instagram or Facebook and we can have a wee chat there and put some social back into social media. Feel free to share your photography adventures by tagging @LightSplashes.
"Learning to draw means learning to see" - Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. "Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see — to see correctly — and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye. The sort of ‘seeing’ I mean is an observation that utilizes as many of the five senses as can reach through the eye at one time." - Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw I knew about blind contour drawing before my vision loss. Didn't practice it much because, you know, perfectionism. It took a pretty drastic loss of vision to recognise the pointlessness of perfectionism, so once I could see again, I was ready to give it another try, which was fortunate, because my "normal" way of drawing didn't work any more. Something happened to the eye-brain-hand connection when vision was temporarily in abeyance and then monocular for a while. Even when I couldn't read the top single letter on the eye chart, there was enough handwriting muscle memory left for me to sign my name and write shopping lists, but, during the period of lost vision and recovery, somehow the connections that allowed me to draw and paint (and compose a reasonable shot through the lens) became scrambled. I could see all the leaves in detail as we drove along tree-lined streets, I could count every blade of grass and read ALL the number plates and signs (out loud!) but so far as actually making pictures went, I had to learn to see all over again. I started out with crayons and coffee cups. More on that another time. I went back to Betty Edwards' classic Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and some advice about getting back to basics from Danny Gregory and decided to give blind contour drawing another shot, too.
It's also calming. It can be a mindful, meditative practice. We're all about mindfulness these days. When it's hard to slow down and meditation is challenging, the blind contour focus on observation and slow drawing offers us a way into a calmer state. So long as we can let go of perfectionism. Blind contour drawing helps with that too. Knowing in advance that the result is likely to be weird and wonky, we can get comfortable with making mistakes, learn that an eraser is not necessarily our friend and enjoy plenty of "happy accidents".
Often, I find blind contour (and non-dominant hand) drawings can have a certain spirit, personality and vibrance that isn't always present in careful attempts at rendering realism. Even when they resemble a car crash!
Want to know more? You could go down the Google rabbit hole, but I recommend author Austin Kleon's thoughts on blind contour drawing as a good starting point and for people who work with little people, grab some ideas from Sarah Krajewski .
Would love to see your blind contour practice. Feeling brave enough to share? Tag @lightsplashes on Instagram or Facebook. Just have fun with it |
AuthorLight Splashes is a family affair, but it's me (Kathy) who'll do most of the banging on in the blog. (Important Photograhy Tip 1: Selfies always look better in black & white). Archives
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