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