Organised and facilitated by Redbrick Artist Jane Storr
This is the second time Jane has run one of these workshops and it proved to be every bit as, if not more successful than the previous one.
To begin with a still life group of objects is set up in a central position with easels situated around the arrangement. Each participant is allowed any three drawing utensils of their choice and that is the only limitation applied.
The aim of collaborative drawing is to keep an open mind, explore and boost creativity as well as discover the freedom of new mark making techniques.
Today we warmed up initially with a blind contour line drawing where our eyes concentrated on the still life objects, but did not look at what was happening on the paper while the brain passed the information to our hand making the marks. Next we drew with our non dominant hand from observation. This resulted in unexpected and beautiful abstracted yet pictorial marks.
The next stage was to draw, for a few minutes, our perception of the still life with any of our three chosen mark makers following a prompt. When the allotted time was up we each moved onto the next persons board and worked on their drawing with their tools. This progression continued with a new prompt for each move. Examples of prompts used were “think about the edges”, “consider big marks”, “tone”, “background”, “foregound” and so on.
After each completed portion of the day we discussed what we thought worked well and what we might take into our own drawing practice. We all thought the blind contour drawing gave the most abstract and interesting marks and thus set the direction a drawing might go in if we worked over the top of it, rather than using it as a warm up exercise. The resulting drawings were interesting and free, lively and loose as can be seen from the photos below.
If you want to expand and experience a way to loosen up and be more creative in your usual drawing methods, I thoroughly recommend attending the next Collaborative Drawing Session.
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