Mystery of the human form

Week 1

A fantastic start to this new course designed to inspire and support students in finding new creative and intuitive ways of making new and surprising imagery. The human form is the starting point for all drawings created on this course but the end results are dictated by students’ own inspiration and the processes involved in the different media and techniques they are encouraged to use during the course.

This weeks session started off with a group process designed to help students loosen up after a hard day at work and get into a creative and playful mindset. Delightful images began to appear on the wall and this will be developed and worked on each week. It will be interesting to see where we can take this group work and I look forward to some surprising results by week 5.

We followed this by working on some blind drawings using our own face and head as inspiration. A few students had never experienced this before and it took a while to get used to drawing with your eyes closed. It may sound simple but until you’ve tried it in a class atmosphere you’re yet to discover the level of trust and determination to keep your eyes closed and keep going. Our minds seem to have an insatiable desire to know what we have drawn and is very reluctant to leave our imagination and alone to simply get on with things. We persevered and students’ drawings resulted in some very personal and interesting results. These were then developed and worked on with eyes open – thereby taking the drawings to a new level.

After a short break we took these line drawings as the starting point for a new process loved by artists the world over for its unpredictable results and the techniques ability to offer up new and unexpected ideas, images, marks and tones that can give artists new insights into their work and result in very different images – Monoprinting. It’s always amazing what the unplanned, playful and creative can give rise to.

We spent the rest of the session having a brilliant FUN time experimenting and playing. Some really powerful images resulted by the end of the session. What a great start to the first week. More surprises next week.