Scribble to Image: Heart-Door Guy

// July 27th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // process, scribble to Image

I’m an obsessive filler of notebooks. One of the great things about this is that I have a great store of quick scraps and sketches to draw on for inspiration whenever I need it.

I’m kind of a Moleskine nut too. I know they’re overpriced, but the main difference for me is that little pocket at the back–I fill mine with images from postcards, flyers, magazines, and use them as inspiration or starting points for filling the pages up.

It turns the moleskine from a mere jotting pad into a mini art reference library–add a good pen and I have an instant pocket-sized art studio.

Once I start a notebook I feel like I’ve embarked on a real project. I love the way seemingly random scribbles talk to each other across the pages, as different themes and images start to repeat and clarify.

The image on the left is a small character that appeared in a sketch I was doing back in 2005. The woman on the right is a preparing for a small circus act that was performing in Pioneer Square in Seattle.

Somehow I sketched the small cartoon clowny figure in response to her. It was just jotted in there, maybe took a minute or so. I know I spent about 10-15 minutes sketching the woman and the tent structure and speakers and wires that were going up around her.

But this small cartoon figure ended up being the more important thing to come out of this drawing. He appears again in that moleskine a number of times, the next time he appears without the hat. In later drawings the little door in his torso opens up and small symbols start to appear in there.

Eventually the heart disappears and the hinged door moves up to take its place.

*****

A while back I was participating in the Creative Every Day challenge and the theme was intuition.

I was mostly just playing with textured backgrounds. I’d got a few backgrounds done and began searching for images that might be suitable to play around with,  and came across the moleskine with the clown guy and his heart-door.

I played with that idea  a little on a torn off piece of sketch paper and this is what came out of that. The door opens to to reveal an eye which is the symbol that arose in response to the theme of ‘Intuition’.

While the clown hat is gone the beginnings are here of a new, almost clown-suit with the stripey sleeves. The unicycle, too, brings back that circus theme.

This was pretty quickly scribbled down too, (with a rainbow coloured pencil!) I think the version at the top original had eyes, but I whited them out because the expression was wrong.

Something about that white smeared over the eyes felt right and the second vesion below it incorporated that as a blindfold which fit perfectly with the eye symbol peering out from his ‘heart-door’.

*****

Here’s the image that finally appeared on the blog.

I used the rainbow pencil to sketch the figure onto the background (I love the randomness of it, the colours keep changing as you draw), and you can still see it here and there though it was mostly painted over.

It was great to see Heart-Door Guy (that’s what I call him in my head) a bit more fleshed out and finished. One of the reasons I like to use a cartoon style of drawing is that the characters I create are expressive and feel like real beings to me.

The way he kept repeating in my sketches makes me think Heart-Door Guy is alive in some way, and wanted to make his way out into the world. He’s appeared on the blog three times now (here, here, and over there!) and I’m still working on him. He continues to shift and grow, and is becoming more real all the time.

*****

I’d love to hear about your creative process. How do you store your images, ideas, melodies? Do you mine small throw-away bits and scribbles and use them to create more substantial pieces?

Do you love Moleskine notebooks, or do your eyes involuntarily roll whenever they’re mentioned? (I won’t be offended if you think they’re silly, I think it’s great that some people love Moleskines and some people hate them.)

Intuition

// May 6th, 2010 // 7 Comments » // creativity, curiosity, illustration

I’m excited by this month’s theme over at Creative Every Day it’s ‘Intuition’. I look forward to a month of giving my inner control freak a rest, as I relax into pushing paint around and letting images arrive as they see fit!

When The Head Rolls Away The Body Rises

// January 3rd, 2010 // 8 Comments » // creativity

As you read this, does your head feel heavy on your shoulders? The head makes up about 5-15% of our body weight, but can feel as if it weighs more.

When creating I often feel the pull to rush upstairs and try to think my way through a project. Sometimes it works too, even if the end result feels a little shoe-horned into being. My head is loud and busy with ideas and opinions on what should be done. Maybe not the greatest ideas or the most shining opinions, but very insistent.

This insistence adds to the physical weight of the head, I’m sure.

When I tune into my body I can sometimes feel the tension rising from the neck as it tries to hold the head up, the compression in my throat as the weight bears down, the forward slump of my frame.

Joanna Macy, in ‘World as Lover, World As Self’, says that we often walk through life as we were a “head on a stick”. To live out our lives within the confines of our skull is  a way of being that is pretty well accepted. The question: “Are you out of your mind?” is pretty telling as a measure of someone’s sanity.

I used to be a member of a Playback Theatre group and every Tuesday night we would meet for rehearsals. Playback theatre is a form of improvised theatre in which audience members stories are played back by the actors. The bulk of the rehearsals were devoted to going into our bodies and working from there.

Training ourselves to move from the feeling body rather than the thinking head was the only way to tap into the intuitive nature of working as an ensemble.

Six different heads all trying to impose their ideas at once would never work. Once you were on-stage and an audience member was telling their story to the conductor, the worst possible thing you could do as an actor was to try and ‘think’ your way through to how you would tell the story.

Instead, we got to be continually amazed at what came up through the wisdom of our  ’collective body’.

Often a performance would begin with a snatch of improvised music from the musician who was a part of the group, and we would respond with a movement. Whatever movement seemed appropriate. From there the performance would almost create itself. More importantly, the performance would often be a revelation to the performers, the audience, and the story-teller whose story was being played back.

One of the most transforming things I got from my Playback Theatre experience was a deep respect for the creative abilities of my own body, and the relief that came from knowing that.

Douglas Harding wrote a book called ‘On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious”

The whole book is great, but the insight in the opening few pages is all he really needed to write. He talks about the day he ‘realized’ that he didn’t actually have a head.

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

I think that’s the best description ever of the relief that can be had from dropping the weight of the head. Do I have a head? Actually, I think I do. But I agree with Harding that when your head sometimes seems to have the weight of an iron ball it can be sweet to just let it go and allow the world to come forward.

There are many ways to create from the body, even in seemingly sedate forms of art. William Wordsworth wrote and revised many of his poems while on long walks, Wallace Stevens composed his poetry while walking the two miles to and from his work  each day. In the world of art the physicality of Jackson Pollock’s painting stands out as an example of letting the head make way for the body’s intelligence to come through.

Here are some things I’ve tried that help me get more into my body:

Mindful bath: I was taught to do this at a stressful time in my life when I suffered from a particularly busy mind. Basically it involved getting into a bath, grabbing some soap and washing myself from the feet up, naming each part of the body as I washed it: “These are  my toes, here is my ankle, … and so on. The combination of being immersed in a warm bath while trying to be mindfully aware of my body is a really powerful exercise.

Writing/drawing with the non-dominant hand: the sheer unfamiliarity this act is enough to bring my awareness down into my hand as I draw or write. Trying out a different way of moving, a new kind of dance for example, also helps to bring me out of an unconscious way of moving to a more aware state.

Juggling: is a great way to get out of the head, I like to do this at the point when I’ve been thinking something over for a long time and just need to wipe the mental slate clean. If you don’t juggle, a mini trampoline also works really well.

Play with sidewalk chalk: I learned the value of this by drawing on our driveway with my son. I like to make huge sweeping lines as I draw, there’s just something really freeing and physically dynamic that really drops me into my body. It’s like a ‘dry’ version of Jackson Pollock style art.

You might like to try some of these (let me know how you go). I bet you have some great ways to bring your awareness into the body and create from there too, I’d love to hear them.

I’ve signed up for  the ‘Creative Every Day’ challenge for 2010. The topic for the month is ‘Body’ So I thought it would be fun to write a blog post each week on the monthly theme. Here’s where you can learn more, and sign up to join the challenge if you like:

http://creativeeveryday.com/creative-every-day-challenge