A Little Spark of Madness

This is what recently evolved on the pages of my journal.  At first glance you may assume I had a crazy week getting used to being back in the classroom again.  That would be correct.  But the little creature on this page is actually the result of a project done with my drawing students.  It was inspired by an exercise from the book Drawing Lab by Carla Sonheim.  Using a series of self generated prompts, we each made original 'creatures'.  (I like to work along with my students whenever possible.)
Pictures of giraffes were used to make a series of overlapping blind contour drawings.  From those, we picked out groupings of lines that suggested a figure, creature, or animal.   Using tracing paper, we 'tweaked' the drawings, developed something we liked and made a graphite transfer into our sketchbooks.  The drawings could be finished using any medium.  I choose to play with some new gel pens.  Too bad the 'sparkle' one doesn't show up very well here.... lots of sparkle.

Speaking of Carla Sonheim, she has a wonderfully creative blog called Snowball Journals.  Check it out and be sure to go back into some of the older posts as there is so much playful inspiration there.