I’ve been busy recently, and not just with the kids. No, I threw caution (and $13 an hour) to the wind and hired a babysitter for Friday afternoons so I could take a class. (I feel as though I’m living some kind of decadent lifestyle, having a few hours away from the kids, and if you knew my life down in Los Angeles you’d think, “Wow, has her life changed.”)
I don’t know specifically where my interest in doing illustrated journaling comes from. I’ve avoided art classes since my age was in the single digits—I always catalogued myself as a “I can’t draw or do art” person. I bought Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain a million years ago; never got too far into it. I read some about nature journaling in Wild Days and the amazing Keeping a Nature Journal. I wanted to run out into my backyard and start sketching everything, but the writers of those books were talented and I, being at the stick-figure level, didn’t know where to start.
Tried painting a little bit with the kids’ watercolors. The pictures came out…watery. Washed out. Uninteresting. And I kept my journals in books with lined pages, text only, no sketches.
But then I noticed the local rec center was having a class on “Illustrated Watercolor Journaling.” And I thought, a rec center class! I can do that!
The class is taught by Gay and Christina, who do this sort of thing full-time. Their journals are right there in the class for us to page through, and they’re very inspiring! The class (two sessions so far) is fabulous. I highly recommend it. Except for the way it’s introduced me to a whole bunch of new stuff to investigate at an art supply store. We paint (I have a little Winsor Newton kit now), we draw, we share various things we’ve found.
I’ve discovered that I’m quite good at blind coutour drawings—drawing something without looking at the page. It’s when I look at the page that the “symbols” (as Betty Edwards puts it) take over.
At home I hauled out my copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and started doing some of the exercises. I even started going through Drawing With Children by Mona Brookes, figuring if she can teach children to draw, she can teach me to draw.
But in the interests of working at it, I have moved from my lined Moleskine to an unlined one. This is practically like changing my name and moving to Antartica in terms of keeping a journal. I take it with me everywhere, and I’m sketching. Yesterday, out with Darin and the kids, he went into Cho’s to get some dim sum and I sketched. He and Sophia went into Rick’s Rather Rich Ice Cream for cones and I sketched.
I’m really excited about this. (I was also excited about the Latin class and that’s going nowhere for this year—schade. But Latin isn’t going anywhere.) I’ve started a new listing of visual journals over in my Neverending List of Journals.