I’m currently taking a Monday night Illustration course at ANU, and am finding myself relearning and reshaping. I haven’t studied art since high school and had forgotten the beauty of exploring way, way, way out of one’s comfort zone.

The first week felt like a shock to the system, and I found myself wanting to crawl under a table and just draw goddess faces over and over again. A month later I’ve settled in to it, and am so enjoying the intrusion it has made into me. There is something rather fulfilling about going back to the basics, drawing circles and filling them over and over again with different textures. Having a box full of painting and drawing implements, and using every single one of them, over and over again to explore every possibility of what mark they could make upon a page. A feather, a reed, a chinese brush, a ballpoint pen, a stick. (Sticks are cool). We haven’t even moved on to using colour yet – there’s just so much out there to explore in the world of black and white (and this from a colour~holic!). Hatching, tone, line. Messy hatch, loose hatch, tight hatch. Contour drawing, line drawing. Texture. Light.

Stripped down to the barest of bare, art is deconstructed and delighted upon.

And at the end of each class… I find myself drawing goddess faces again, but this time different. The goddesses evolve, just as I do…

blessings,
Leonie
{who is quietly obsessed by texture circles}