I’m currently part of an on-line creative exploration course. It’s nothing onerous, just something to stimulate ideas and create some random drawings without too much thought.

The word for the day was ‘Journey’ and I jotted down a few things that came to mind: travel, distance, spread out, moving, traversing, random movement.

I was drawn to ‘random movement’ and using drawing inks, a dropper and a straw I dropped ink onto watercolour paper and started blowing it around.

I immediately thought of the seaweed I walk around when I take the dog to the beach.

‘Journey’ to ‘seaweed’, who’d have thought?

I dropped individual yellow blobs on paper and blew each of them in a single direction. Wetting the paper first I added areas (as opposed to blobs) of turquoise and blew it in as many directions as I could before it dried.

Swimming tadpoles, perhaps?

I added a third colour.

The black became rather overwhelming so this is a crop of the best section. The fine lines on the right hand side remind me of maps and road systems.

I added more colours and drew over the surface.

As an afterthought, I should probably have drawn my ‘streets’ over the yellow/green/red area and left the blue to be perceived as a body of water.

I like the idea of drawing or printing over this kind of background and these short exercises will soon fill my sketchbook.

3 responses to “Exploration: Journey”

  1. This transformed into quite an interesting piece. I definitely can see the seaweed, but the my initial thought on the first and second images was “artistic neuron.” By the third, it had me thinking about looking up through a canopy of trees or something. I like how it transformed though at the end; the map effect is very cool. Very nice!

    1. This was quite freeing, seeing as I’m normally agonising over every tiny mark I make. Fun to do and I really enjoy drawing over the top of these random coloured pieces.

      1. Haha yes I hear that, sometimes it’s hard to avoid dwelling on small details. Worry over little details is definitely something I’ve had to work on. This one sounds like a really excellent experience!

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