‘Free your mind and make as many possible marks as your hand will let you; let you let it trail across the paper slowly or use fast movements to give strong bold marks such as dashes, long wavy lines, dots and circles. Be inventive. Don’t attempt to draw anything in particular. Just try to become involved in the lines, dots and different kinds of shading which each medium will produce.’
I didn’t expect this exercise to be as difficult as it was, as a teenager I would spend most of my nights doodling to bring out ideas and still do to this day; but when asked to clear my mind and think of ‘water, flowers, buildings…‘ I found myself locked into my surroundings and the tall concrete buildings of Bangkok.
I decided that the best way to approach the exercise was to limit the different drawing tools I used in each doodle as the position of my hand while holding a pen or pencil would smudge other soft mediums. And so I had to decide what I would use to create each image beforehand.
After the first two or three I was still struggling to break free and every time I thought I succeeded in the task at hand the Bangkok skyline would make another appearance so I decided to take time-out for a couple of days.
Round two was a lot easier, I chose to start off with charcoal which was something that I had never used until exercise 1 ‘Holding Pens and Pencils‘. The charcoal was great for creating swooping lines and swirls which helped me to get away from the squares and rectangles I’d been creating in previous doodles while still thinking about buildings and water. I thoroughly enjoyed creating the next few doodles and it was great to try out new mediums such as graphite sticks and hard pastels.
My Drawing Course 