Session Two

Hello and welcome to the second of our Art at Home sessions. If you would like to revisit session one, you can find it here.

As we did last week, we’ll begin this session with an exercise we call Me Today. After Me Today, we have Mirror Drawing and Animal Marks as our quicker games this week, and Observational Drawing for our longer activity. You can use the buttons below to jump to a particular activity, or scroll down the page to complete the whole session.

For this week’s session, you will need paper, and something to draw with, like a pen or a pencil, as well as some paint for the Animal Marks game. Any scrap paper or card will do, and opened out cereal boxes are particularly excellent for painting on.

It’s completely fine to adapt the exercises to suit you and what materials you have. Remember that the idea is to have fun, and absorb yourself in a creative activity, with no particular desired result – everyone will do them differently. We would love to hear how you get on – please tell us!

Me Today

We begin with our Me Today exercise. This is a quick drawing showing a snapshot of how you are feeling, today, on a small piece of paper.

It can be as simple as you like – you can use colour, line, texture, shape, anything at all. It can be a drawing showing something real, or a smudge, or a scribble, or some words – its up to you.

At the end of 8 sessions we will show you how to make all your Me Todays into a small booklet – a record of how life has been for you during these weeks. For this reason it’s a good idea to use the same size of paper each time, so the sheets of paper can be put together between cardboard covers.

We suggest allowing 15 minutes or so for this exercise.

Mirror Drawing

Animal Marks

This game is about thinking about and making the kind of marks that animals might make. For instance, little scratchy marks for a mouse, slithery lines for a snake, paw prints for a tiger, and so on. You could imagine what the underwater swim lines made by a fish might look like, or the movements of a bird, perhaps hopping, pecking, flying, or flapping!

Using paint, try to recreate these tracks or prints. Try using different tools; you could try a brush, your fingers, a sponge, a stick or even plastic bottle tops. Experiment with texture and line, and see how many different animals, real or imagined, you can come up with.

You could experiment with parts of your own body – how many different marks can you make using your fingers, toes, palms, feet, elbows, even your chin or nose! You could also get creative with how you’re making marks – stroking, dabbing, stamping and so on.

Observational Drawing

Those two words might sound intimidating, but this is all about looking, not about getting any particular result. For this exercise, you need some paper and something to draw with, and a collection of objects.

First, arrange your collection on the centre of a table, or something that you can move around easily. You could use any container, such as vase, jug, or a large jar, as your centrepiece, and fill it with anything – kitchen utensils, foliage, sticks, hairbrushes etc. Add some small objects, such as toys, bottles, stones, or any little things around the base of the container. The idea is that from any position around the table you cannot see all of the objects – some things will always be out of sight.

Choose a starting position around the table and make a drawing of what is in front of you. Don’t worry too much about accuracy, unless you really want to – but try to include everything that is in your line of vision, however sketchily.

Now move to the other side of the table, and do this again. You are drawing the same collection of things, but from a different perspective. If you’re enjoying the exercise, repeat from as many angles around the table as you like. Think about what changes as you move around.

A variation on this exercise is to look at, and draw, what’s known as ‘negative space’. This means the shape that is made in the air by the objects you have arranged on your table. Give it a try!

That’s the end of this week’s session. Thank you for joining us! 

If you’d like to share what you’ve created, we would love to see it. You can send us pictures on Facebook or Twitter, or get in touch with Rose directly by email.