In between paintings, I have been following the tutorial of Alena Hennessy, called 30 Days of Grace. It’s a spiritual approach to intuitive painting with each day a short assignment be it collecting thoughts, finding inspiration or painting our findings. Today is on “Creating without Expectations”
Getting Started
Alena uses a large sketchbook without the spiral spine, sort of like a proper book. However, all my sketchbooks either have the spiral spine or with tear-out pages. As I prefer to use what I have, I improvised by taking took a huge piece of paper and splitting it in half with by drawing a line
The Fun Begins!
We grab our pencil and on one side of the paper we randomly start drawing with our non-dominant hand, which in my case would be my left hand. Then on the other side, we switch our pens to the dominant hand but close our eyes and begin drawing “blindly”. And why? This enables our pen or pencil to travel across freely without us consciously controlling the movements. Interestingly, my conscious mind was focused on bunnies hanging around on a sunny day surrounded by flowers but when drawn as instructed, the results were quite different from expected. Can you tell which side was with my left hand and which side drawn blindly?
Let’s Paint This!
And now we open our eyes! We start painting freely and intuitively based on all the scribbles we made with the pencil. I decided to join the two sides (as Alena does in her sample too) by erasing the middle line and colouring in with my acrylic inks. But wait a minute, there are two suns! That would be a bit strange to have no matter how abstract this painting is to be…
I then turned the sun on the right hand side and made it a big flower. As it is supposed to be an intuitive painting, it need not resemble a perfect flower right? At this point, I was more focused on colours and effects. Once I started, I kept going, finding ways to develop this painting more by adding flowers and doodles. Even in places that were overlapping like the flowers when using the pencil earlier, I merely used the opportunity to trace over them. A series of mediums were used including paint pens, acrylic markers and India Ink. And now!
When I was penciling this in the beginning my mind was about having a bunny on each side, as if they could be twins! Then somehow I ended up trying to create a similar drawing for each which resulted in two suns and then having to recreate. I found this exercise a great way to develop my thoughts and creativity without controlled movements. It would be also interesting to make two separate paintings, one using my left and and the other blindly drawing and see what I would also come up with! Of course it will be something cute…
My Kawaii Quarter 