Keeping Inspired - Drawing a Day
Keeping inspired is really important for an artist. Although I haven't been posting my Drawing a Day drawings every day, I've been able to make sure to draw every day.
Since the purpose of my New Year's Resolution is to keep creative and keep moving, learning and growing in a positive direction, sometimes being creative doesn't mean it has to be an actual drawing each day. The big thing is to intentionally do something each day which helps my drawing, staying conscious of how the "something" helps me grow as an artist, and how learning or doing whatever it is contributes to getting to my goal as an artist.
For as long as I can remember, origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, fascinated me. The idea that a simple flat square of paper could be transformed in seconds into a recognizable representation of something else gave me an almost magical feeling. One of the first things I remember doing with origami was in 1984 when I heard the story of Sadako Sasaki of Hiroshima, who tried to stave off her death from radiation sickness by making one thousand origami cranes. Her classmates and other friends finished them for her after her death. I had learned at one time how to make a crane, and the story inspired me to begin making 1000 cranes as a symbolic way to wish for the end to the Cold War, which was escalating rapidly at the time. This year, one of the book stores had an origami-a-day kit which contains 365 sheets of origami paper and instructions to make something new each day. Doing this got me interested in other designs that I hadn't done yet, so one of my Drawing a Day things was a samurai helmet, shown here.
Looking for origami projects (which led me to the samurai helmet) also led me to napkin folding instructions, to help make a table setting more elegant or festive when using cloth napkins. We have some cloth napkins here, but no iron or starch, so I practiced a few designs but the best one of the bunch was this Bird of Paradise motif. It could still use some ironing and starch, but it looks great just as it is.
The third Drawing a Day drawing I'm posting comes from another book store kit to help you learn Chinese watercolor painting. Watercolor has never been my strong suit, and the delicate tones and free movement that traditional Chinese watercolors display have always inspired me. I thought, if I could finally learn even a small fraction of the technique for capturing the feel and atmosphere of a traditional Chinese watercolor, I will be a much better artist and be able to convey more of my artistic vision to people seeing my work. So, this last photo is of a koi fish swimming in a stream in front of mountains. This is a bad composition, but it's actually two practice paintings on the same piece of paper. I just thought each turned out very well for me, and I did them at the same time, and it doesn't look that bad to have a koi swimming in a stream with mountains in the background.
