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.
