Play is serious learning

Consistent play has been hard to grok lately. I want to play for the joy it brings, the creative flow. But it’s also a requirement for the drawabox.com lessons I’m doing. So I’ve made it a focus for February and it’s on my calendar every day.

Here’s what came out of this week’s play time —

The subject is the famous chimpanzee Ham from the Mercury space program of the early 1960s (see the In the Works tab above). But, the picture came together in a way that breaks with my usual practice. So it definitely counts as play.

I started with the question, what do I care about Ham and his history? Then, I collected a few photos and words from my research, drew the grid on the paper, and filled each box one at a time letting the image-making flow. As the last step, I tied it together as a single composition. Iterative. Four sittings over two days.

I discovered some wonderful things during the process. Like, white moves the eye around a picture and repeated elements create rhythm. The ebony pencil and black pastels for the darker and smudgier marks work fine in the sketchbook. Drawing what I’m most attracted to first is a great way to start. Carbon paper and a fat pencil does indeed give a lighter, softer imprint. Photos ground the composition in place and time. And tracing around a real artifact (the padlock I collected from Holloman Air Force Base) packed an emotional wallop.

I also discovered some things I’d do differently next time — like the top left corner. The man would be in silhouette, no detail on the face. More attention to the legibility of the text is probably warranted too. As are more textures like the ones I made in last week’s play time.

I can see doing more of these in my sketchbook. Here the scaffolding of the composition is part of the composition itself. That’s interesting. And it feels wonderfully generative. After all, the grid is like a collection of thumbnails. Depending on where I look, combining and cropping, different ideas take primacy.

One art friend summing up the approach said, you gave the subconscious a chance to have a say. Yes indeed.

Play is serious learning.