Five Minute Sketching Ideas
I have been swamped with real life “stuff” … plus quitting smoking … I have not really had [or made] the time to even blog or paint at all the last few weeks … last week I found myself with an extra fifteen minutes in the morning before time to rush out the door … I have no idea how that happened … usually I am rushing around that much late getting out the door … Miss Sugar Plum must have done her business right away instead of wandering around for half an hour as she normally does every morning … she likes to go outside but she usually takes her own time at taking care of business … I get to see a variety of different cloud formations every morning though and enjoy the changing light on the buildings.
Anyway … back to my spare minutes before needing to rush out the door … my watercolor pencils are sitting right there on my drawing table in plain site … mocking me and calling to me … paint … draw … find time to sit down here at this drawing table ….
I have a couple 5.5″ x 8.5″ 140 lb Cold Press Watercolor tablets … I knew I didn’t have a lot of time … so I opened up one and drew one of my impressionistic palm trees … no background … nothing but a palm tree on the white paper … that was last week … then on Saturday morning … while drinking morning coffee and BEFORE starting on the work I brought home from my day job that I needed to be doing … I opened that tablet up again to a new page … and created another impressionistic palm tree …. then I worked awhile on the computer doing my tech writer stuff … then I went to the apt complex monthly brunch … then I came home and did another impressionistic palm tree using my watercolor pencils before going back to my tech writer stuff.
All three sketches are now sitting there waiting for me to take pictures of them … and decide what I will do with those sketches … I am thinking that perhaps they would be a great collage … maybe I need to do a quick sketch of water … and perhaps another of a sky … and put them all together to collage a lovely seascape from individual slices of my thoughts. I need to buy some archival safe glue for creating it.
Take five minutes here and there in your life to create some sketches with watercolor pencils … it will help remind you that you really are an artist that needs to create your own projects and not just “earning a living”. Yes life and busy happens … way too much sometimes and many times … but being creative people … we can create ways for us to connect with ourselves even during our busiest seasons.
Then create a collage of those pieces … maybe it will be an abstract … maybe it will be a landscape … but it will definitely be interesting to see how different moments can come together to make a whole art project. I’m glad I still have the scrapbooking decorative edge scissors I bought for my grandson years ago when he loved to cut paper! It will be fun to use them on my palm tree slices. Watercolor collage … I hadn’t really thought of it til now .. .but it sounds like fun!
