Take a class: “Imaginative Drawing” at the Lawrence Arts Center

class resource booksImaginative Drawing is a beginning-level drawing class. It is one of my favorite classes to teach, and I’ll teach it again this spring at the Lawrence Arts Center. This class begins on Tuesday, March 19, 2024, and meets each Tuesday evening for eight weeks, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm.

 

The class is based on drawing prompts and exercises that we do together each week in our own sketchbook-journals. By the end of the eight-week session, we’ll use what we’ve learned to begin creating a drawing-related work of art in any medium we choose, as a finished piece.

 

Doodle-creatures from random marksFor the first few weeks of class, we’ll explore drawing as making expressive marks on a page using all kinds of pens, pencils, and other mark-makers. We’ll make comic-style “timed” drawings as a way to doodle, and we’ll also doodle by building up a series of spontaneous lines that eventually turn into pictures and patterns. We’ll “noodle” our doodles, using a controlled hand to create a finished look by adding color, texture, and shading. We’ll make drawings that are based on observation, drawing the objects and people that we see, as we see them. We’ll consider how observational-drawing informs imaginative-drawing, and vice-versa.

 

Sometimes we’ll draw at drawing “stations” where we choose from a menu of exercise options, staying for as little or as long as we want to at a station. These sorts of exercises will focus on stretching, distorting, or abstracting images that we’ll draw using exaggeration in an imaginative drawingfrom observation. On a different station-day we’ll explore the use of “randomness” as the basis for making something new: random squiggles on a page, random cracks in the sidewalk, or random shapes of clouds can provide the building blocks for making faces, creatures, or monsters. Each week we learn something new about the creative process. Along the way we’ll ask the question, Where do creative ideas come from? We’ll engage exercises that seem to get to the heart of creativity, bringing disparate ideas together in ways that are new. We’ll also learn about how to keep a sketchbook-journal, using artist Corita Kent’s focus on the journal as a “sense diary,” and cartoonist Lynda Barry’s “daily diary” formats to bring words and images together. Towards the end of the eight-week session, we’ll discuss composition, that is, how to arrange the elements in our drawings with attention to the drawing as a whole. We’ll then imagine a drawing that we would like to make, plan it, and make it.

 

eclipsedoodle002 copyA writer-friend who took Imaginative Drawing several  years ago recently said about this class  on Facebook: “Take this class! About two hours ago, I pulled out my sketchbook from the class. It is part brain health, part creativity, part stress relief.” And I would contend that the class is also a way for students to build confidence in their drawing abilities and to learn imaginative drawing skills to be used in art forms as different as comics and quilting.


I strive to create a warm atmosphere where students will feel encouraged and comfortable drawing in ways that are new. While I encourage students to share their work with others in class, because there is so much to learn from each other’s experiments, I also make it clear that no one is ever required to share; “passing” is always an option. And homework is optional, too.

 

Song in my HeartRegister now for the Spring session, beginning the third week of March. Senior discounts and financial aid are available. Register either on-line or at the Lawrence Arts Center, 940 New Hampshire St., Lawrence, KS,  phone 785.843.2787. To register for “Imaginative Drawing” on-line, go here

 

 

Going / Home / Coming at the Percolator

This is a detail of "Democrats!" at the Lawrence Percolator.

Everyone is invited to the opening reception for the exhibit Going / Home / Coming on August 13, 6 – 9 pm, at the Lawrence Percolator in Lawrence, KS. The artists whose work will be shown explore the theme of “home” with the following in mind: When do you become aware of home? In what situations do you not feel at home? How does the idea of home change over time?

 

My piece in the exhibit includes an anecdote from my childhood about growing up as a Democrat in a Republican state — my home state of Kansas. I made the piece by applying and scratching off various inks on a clayboard surface. I hope you’ll enjoy seeing and reading this quirky little piece.

 

The Lawrence Percolator is located in the alley between 9th and 10th streets and behind the Lawrence Arts Center on New Hampshire St. The exhibit runs August 13 – September 11, 2011, and is open on Saturdays and Sundays from noon – 6 pm, and on the Final Friday of each month from 5 – 8 pm.

Final Friday Events in Lawrence, March 25, 2011

Join me for the Final Friday festivities in Lawrence, KS, on March 25, 2011, from 5:30 – 9 pm.
I will show this new mosaic at the Lawrence Art Party,  at the Hobbs-Taylor Lofts on 8th and New Hampshire. I’ll be grouting this mosaic tomorrow, so wish me luck!

I’ll also be showing this new clayboard (also called scratchboard) piece at the Lawrence Art Party.

And finally, I made this new clayboard piece with colored ink, and it is only 5 inches square.  Come see it, and bid on it, at the Lawrence Arts Center’s annual art auction.  The opening is part of the Final Friday festivities on March 25.