Mark Making Blitz

This has been my week for mark making.  I wanted to freshen up my mark making vocabulary, and this week gave me plenty of new ideas.

I've been taking an online class with Dionne Swift called Drawing for Textiles.  The first week is focused on abstract drawing and the second on interpreting those drawings into textiles, which I haven't done yet.

Without giving away too much of her class, here are some of my drawings from week one.  We were instructed to choose about six items that are meaningful to us and use them for a different approach in each drawing. I chose some of my favorite jewelry to use, not that you would know it from the drawings.  We were instructed to scale everything up as large as we could, so I did all of these on big pieces of newsprint.

First came blind contour drawings switching media along the way.

Shadow drawings.

Straight line drawings using only 12 " lines.  Oh my!  I don't know that I got this assignment at all.  I found myself so unable to draw anything resembling the objects that I started paying more attention to density of placement.

Finally drawing from 4 ft. away.

I think it's fabulous practice to take the same objects and rework them so drastically.  It's a really fun way to get some fresh marks.  We will now isolate small areas to work in fiber.

Dionne's class happened to coincide with a Mark Making class I had already signed up for at Oregon College of Arts and Craft with Jason Berlin.

The day got off to a fun start.  We explored all sorts of fountain pens, bamboo pens, and quills with ink.

My favorite assignment of the day was a layered charcoal drawing in which we explored different weights of charcoal and different erasers.  I could do that all day.

Unfortunately, the afternoon exercises were more about exploring mixed media and drifted away from mark making.  Not as inspiring but it's always nice to spend the day in OCAC's beautiful drawing and painting studio.