I can’t believe we are already halfway through my first Art Club for adults! I’ve been ABSOLUTELY loving it – I mean, REALLY REALLY loving it. Some of the participants are ‘creative’ in some way (in ” marks because of course everyone is creative in one way or another), others feel quite unsure and unconfident with creativity and have been pushed right out of their comfort zones!
Last night was my favourite session so far. It was also the one I was most anxious about – because even though I’d planned a couple of things to do, I was a bit unsure about it, plus it was meant to be a session setting up forfuture projects and someone had just let me know they weren’t coming… I arrived slightly late, then opened my car boot and some of the things I’d taken with me fell out and smashed, shattering glass all over the dark car park which added to my anxiety. Instead, my planned session morphed into something quite different and unexpected, and utterly wonderful (well I thought so anyway 🙂 )
I’d planned a 15 minute fun drawing excersize to loosen everyone up and get creative juices flowing. I’d taken along a selection of very different shaped and textured objects, some man made, some natural, some man made but altered by nature.



They each chose what they wanted to draw first off, and I set a timer for 5 minutes. Their task was to draw what was in front of them for 5 minutes, looking at just the shapes. Then 5 minutes drawing just the negative spaces (the bits between the bits!) Then, 5 minutes drawing without looking at the paper – we all loved that one so much that we did ity twice! Then, 5 minutes using our non dominant hand.
The results we re really interesting!





Then I had a brief comfort break (basically I needed a wee) and on an A4 piece of paper we chose new objects, and drew for 10 minutes without taking the pen off the paper, for 10 minutes. Then another object-swop, and then we ‘drew’ these new objects with scissors, into our non-stop line drawings! We were then left with shapes with lines on.
On the backs of our big pieces of paper, we scribbled the outline of the cut out shapes, which made beautiful patterns. Some of us chose to stick our cut-out shapes onto here, others chose to scribble onto another A4 paper and stick them onto there. The results are all lovely.















It was lovely how everyone got quite meditative, the atmosphere was really calm and peaceful.
That’s just one of the amazing good things that drawing does for you!

























































