reverb10 ~ Prompt 5: Letting Go

Let Go.
What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?
(Prompt Author: Alice Bradley)

~

Ok, this is starting to feel like therapy. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I’m already in therapy once a week and it’s hard work and even though I also want to dig deep to reflect and reverb, I also want to enjoy it. So at first I was resistant. But then I let go (see what I did there) and gave in to my need for play…



~ Letting go,
my "enigmatic" semi-blind contour self-portrait,
(Pen, ink & picnik)

Upon further reflection, this ended up being a rather joyful exercise. In addition to making the above drawing, I also made a list of things I’d let go of, things I no longer needed. Because they’d been weighing me down. But I don’t want to share the list. Except for one item. One thing I let go of this year, even if means having to let go of it every day, several times a day. The notion that I cannot…

drawings from italy trip

More blooming tulips!?!?

All in a day's play...

Self-portraits

The top two are blind contour, the second has colour added later courtesy of oil pastels.

blind contour amenomes

That's the flower, not the sea creature.

Yesterday, I bought myself this bunch of flowers to cheer myself up after the expected arrival of Lotty & Jakey didn't happen as planned. We are hoping it is still going to happen, but who knows when!

Anyway, they're very pretty and I love drawing flowers so I decided to have a go at drawing them blind and then colouring them in with watercolour afterwards. I quite like how they turned out, what do you think?

More "experimental" drawings

Here are yesterday afternoon's "experimental" drawings that I did of my friend Mad. The first three were done in ink. The first was drawn in a single line without taking the pen off the page, the second was drawn blind contour (without looking at the page), the third was drawn both without looking at the page and drawn in a single line, and the fourth was done in willow charcoal with my left hand (the hand I don't usually draw or write with).


































It was great fun experiementing with all these different ways of drawing and I was surprised to learn that I enjoyed the blind contour drawing the most, I liked the freedom of doing it, the excitement of not knowing how it was going to turn out, and I also liked the end result of the blind contour drawing the most.

For more drawings from the day, go here.