Automatic drawing which turned into a botanical

pencil in an 8×10″ sketch pad

Last week as we walked out of Target to the parking lot, what do we see but a large black bear wandering around.  He clearly had forgotten where he was parked.   We respectfully waited until he found his car and drove off.  🙂 My sister said that bears also want good quality at affordable prices.

Did I mention I’m over bears?  He eventually ran into the woods and we got in our car and drove away.

Two days ago the city installed new stop signs on our corner. To alert drivers of the change they also installed signs leading up to the stop sign. Like this:

If your job is to install traffic and street signs and you don’t see the GLARING TYPO in this sign, perhaps this job is not for you.  Since I am a civic minded person, I wrote to the city to alert them of this issue which, admirably, they fixed the next day.  So shout out to them!

The above drawing was done using a method called automatic drawing.  Automatic drawing was started by the surrealists to free themselves of representational art.  I believe the first person to do it was the artist Andre Masson.

Andre Masson and automatic drawing

We started by taking a pencil or two (one in each hand) and just making lines without looking or thinking. This is different from blind contour drawing, which is drawing while looking at the object but not at the paper. Once we had some lines on the page we went back and this time, since it was a botanical drawing class, we looked for shapes that could be plants, leaves or flowers and drew back into the lines.   It was great fun and I will do it again.