Bird in Hand Arts

One way to introduce creativity into your work is to combine objects that don’t normally occur together…or at least, not in the scale you choose to draw them.

Puppyseed Muffin

“Puppyseed Muffins” came to me while I was working in the hospitality area on an AKC canine agility trial.  I was in charge of putting food around on tables, tidying up, making sure the people competing in the trial were fed and comfortable.  I had my sketchbook with me and was desultorily drawing this and that…a plate of muffins, a dog lying under a table, a human competitor hunched over a cup of coffee.  Okay, let’s try a dog sitting on a muffin.  Why not?

How about a giant orange with medieval figures surrounding it?

Giant Orange

The little figures I borrowed from Bert Dodson’s Keys to Drawing with Imagination (North Light Books 2007), an excellent compendium of suggestions for making your art more artful.  The orange was just sitting around waiting to be peeled, drawn and then eaten.

This next sketch is from a  journal I made during a trip to France in 2000.  We were staying in a private home where our hostess was quite a cook and quite a gardener.  She had cooked us a soup using a pumpkin she’d grown, which she identified as a “potiron.”

I wondered about the French word “potiron”…whether it might have derived from the English phrase ”iron pot,” via some corruption introduced by the voyageurs who no doubt brought pumpkins to France from the New World.

Voyageur

This is admittedly a fanciful bit of folk etymology…so I created a fanciful representation of a voyageur paddling his “potiron” down some cold northern river.  Of course when I got around to looking the word up in a French etymological dictionary, I discovered that ”potiron” allegedly derived from the Persian word for melon.  I like my etymology better.

I took a two week-long residential drawing class at the Penland School of Crafts some years ago, where the teacher introduced us to the following exercise:   grab a book, any book, at random.  (This works best if the book is on a subject you know nothing about and if it’s non-fiction).  Set a timer for two minutes.  Open the book somewhere and read until the timer goes off.  Reset the timer for two minutes.  Draw until the timer goes off.  Set the timer again for two minutes.  Open the book somewhere else and read until the timer goes off.  Draw for two minutes.  Repeat  reading and drawing for an hour or so.  You’ll end up with twelve to fifteen sketches whose spontaneity is notable.

We did this twice at Penland.  The teacher did not let us select our own books; he dealt out books he had brought along with him and we had to read what he gave us.  The first time we did this, I was given a book on the care and feeing of exotic birds, full of wonderful illustrations  and photos, so I didn’t quite get the point of the exercise.  I drew lots of  pictures of birds, sometimes just the suggestion of birds (two minutes isn’t very long after all), but I used a lot of vibrant color.

The second time we did this exercise, he gave me a book on fetal alchohol syndome on the Navajo Reservation.  This was a mind-bender. ”Fetal alchohol sydrome” refers to a constellation of physical and mental impairments appearing in children born to mothers who abuse alcohol while pregnant.   The book was full of disturbing images: destruction, mayhem,  alcoholism, murder, suicide, hideously disfunctional families, ruined lives, untimely deaths.

I’ve kept the drawings this book evoked from me for years.  They’re weird  and unsettling, which may be the reason I’ve kept them.  I don’t often go to the dark side in my art.

An artist named Pat Bowers taught me this when I lived in Oriental, North Carolina.  The idea here is to force yourself out of your own self-imposed ways of thinking by commiting yourself to drawing the same object one hundred times but varying the way you draw it every time.  For awhile, it’s easy.  It gets progressively harder as you go along, largely because you’ve tried all your favorite ways of representation and you have to pull new ones up from your imagination.

This is the genius behind Frida Kahlo’s success as an artist. By painting her own portrait over and over, she forced herself into increasingly fantastic forms of representation.

Check back from time to time, as I will be adding other self-portraits.

If you ever have to serve a life sentence somewhere, this exercise might help pass the time.

Distortion Grid

Start with an image you want to work on. It can be something you created yourself or it can be someone else’s work. (Don’t worry about the moral ambiguity of copying here; by the time you’re finished, you will have created your own original piece.) Pencil a grid on top of the image. I photocopied my original first and put the grid on the copy, leaving the original unblemished.

Next, take a sheet of tracing paper and create a new grid, but instead of using straight lines, use bends and curves. In doing so, you will have created what is called “a distortion grid.”

Tape this distortion grid to a light table and tape drawing paper on top of it, making sure you can see the new grid through the paper. (Don’t have a light table? Tape the grid and the drawing paper to a window.) Transfer the original image cell by cell onto the drawing paper using the distortion grid as a guide. When you’re finished, remove the drawing paper from the light box and survey the results.

If you don’t like the way the new piece looks, go back and try a different set of bending curving lines in your distortion grid. I owe this technique to Trish Harding, a local Bellingham artist, who used it in one of her workshops.

Perspective Grid

As an alternative to a distortion grid, you can use a “perspective grid”, which introduces single point perspective into a drawing. (Insert perspective grid here) To create my perspective grid, I drew a line eight inches long, dividing it into one inch segments. I drew eight lines converging from each segment along the base line to a single point above the mid-point of the baseline.

I then drew a second line parallel to the base line. Next I drew a diagonal line from the lower left hand-corner corner of the base line through the upper right hand corner of the cell formed by the two parallel lines (the base line and the line above it).

Finally I drew a series of lines parallel to the base line and intersecting the diagonal line to complete my grid.

The remarkable thing about a perspective grid is that you can use it in any of four possible orientations. If you put the baseline at the bottom of your drawing, the effect will be as if you were looking at a picture drawn on a mat at your feet.

If the base line is oriented toward the left hand side of the drawing, the drawing you make will appear to be hanging on the left wall of a long corridor.