Sketching for Making: Creating and Photographing the Original Art

Moving on to the method as it currently stands, I start as before with an ink drawing that is as close to mindless doodling as I can get at that moment. I believe that drawing while distracted would work best, such as at a restaurant during a conversation or while listening to music. It is important to let the mind be as free as possible, with little involvement from the conscience.

Original ink drawing

Here is an example of why this is necessary: After I made the first in this series of drawings, had worked out the next steps and knew where it would lead, I found that making the next drawing was very difficult. The main obstacle, I soon realized, was me trying to "draw something." My awareness and anticipation were getting in the way, my hand had become self conscious in much the same way as a person does when being closely watched by another who is telling you to act naturally. It just ain't happening...

Scanning the drawing for motifs

So far the method is as before, but next comes the first innovation: using the camera on my iPhone. It occurred to me that instead of cutting out little sections of the drawing, it was better and easier to scan the drawing using the display of my iPhone, then clicking pictures as I go. The obvious advantage being that the selections are fluid and unbounded by context or scale; I can make numerous photos of the same section involving different images together and I can zoom in or out by simply moving the camera. And I can take LOTS of pictures, increasing my chances of finding something that inspires a great project.

Selecting a section of the drawing

Image acquired, a little iCloud magic makes my photos available instantly on all my devices. I switch to my new iPad Air 2 with Sketchbook Pro installed and begin the selection process. After reviewing the photos, the image is imported into Sketchbook as the bottom or reference layer of what will become a multi-layered sketch.

I'm not going to go into any of the technicalities of using graphics software. Any of them will do if you know how to use it well enough to suit your purposes. I use Sketchbook for a number of reasons: it's cheap, it operates easily across all of my mobile devices and my PC. All of the drawings can be shared via the cloud making it fairly seamless to work whenever or wherever I want at any given moment. Personally I find it a bit limited and will eventually move to CorelDraw, but for now it does what I need. Did I mention it's cheap?

One word about choosing software: try to find an app that has "layers." Layers allow you to work over the top of existing art without disturbing what's underneath. Layers can be turned on and off, moved to different positions in the order of the stack, made more or less opaque or simply deleted. Another useful tool is an "eyedropper" which allows you to select a color from the existing drawing and replicate it as the virtual "ink" for your pen or brush tool. Also basic functions such as rotation, translation, scaling and text are incredibly useful. A variety of brushes, pens and textures is great to have as well.

NEXT: Developing the Motif as a Sketch

Sketching for Making: Some Background on My Sketching Methods

Back in The Day, it was common in art schools to teach several methods of generating ideas based on techniques such as automatic drawing (automatism) practiced by surrealists past and present. In my early drawing classes at East Carolina University, we worked with ink-on-glass monoprints, random assemblage and similar techniques that distance the artist from the origination of the design motifs. After the starting point is established, independent of the mind, the artist then manipulates the generated material in any manner that suits the needs of the project.

The method I am creating uses automatic drawing to realize images springing from the subconscious mind. Tapping the subconscious should provide a purely personal expression unfiltered through intellect and experience. Once the drawings exist, the idea is to take them into a digital drawing program and use them as material for discovering forms and motifs unique to me.

Of course, the value of completely original source material is immense. Nearly every artist struggles with this problem at some point in their career; to come up with ideas that are solely "mine" and not derived from some previous school of thought or a "hack" off someone else's work. If we can just find the nascent bud of an image, free of reference, the mental canvas is no longer blank but contains the beginning forms and vectors are established.

Personally, my favorite way to produce stream of subconscious images is with brush and ink. It's a familiar method I've used for 40 years and flows from my hand without undue thought or effort. In the past I've made sheets of brush doodles as a warm up for painting sessions. Lately I have started going back through the images to find shapes that might suggest a ceramic form, then going back into the drawing with a pen to realize the forms I can see in the "cloud" of doodles. Then I would take scissors and cut out the most promising, ending up with lots of little slips of paper in all shapes and sizes.

The next step was to start a page in my sketchbook with the paper scrap, drawings of possible ways to make the sketch "real" and reference materials for possible surface decoration.

**NEXT: Creating and Photographing the Original Art

Artist Statement

My grandmother saw to it that I started painting in oils on canvas as soon as I could hold a brush, ensuring a fourth generation of women artists in our family. I started pottery classes in high school, studying privately with Marilyn Hartness who was a graduate student at the time and is currently an Associate Professor of Ceramics at Wingate College. I studied Classics for two years at Hollins College and then attended East Carolina University with a major concentration in painting under my mentor, Dr Emil Farnham, PhD (who studied under Hans Hoffman in NYC and Provincetown) and Edward Reep. After getting married and having my son, I completed my BFA (cum laude) in Painting at the University of Florida, Gainesville under Hiram Williams. Since then I've worked as a studio artist with brief stints in commercial and fiber arts. I've also studied English and Belgian bobbin lacemaking for many years and enjoy wheel-spinning art yarns. At the beginning of 2013, I decided to revisit my early interest in ceramics and began taking classes from Don Williams at the Morean Center for Clay.

My method of working is grounded in the early 20th century abstract expressionism, with special influences from John Marin, Charles Burchfield and Mark Tobey. I see my art as compositional and I often tie series to specific works of music, trying to make a visual representation of the rythms and melodies I hear. The underlying structure is based on Hans Hoffman's theory of "push-pull" composition and I am currently working to realize these ideas 3-dimensionally in clay.