Left: Another pencil and gouache fantansy person. In a handmade journal containing Nideggen paper. Click on the image to view an enlargement.
I'm having a lot of fun playing with the layering of the paint. Here's my point—you don't have to necessarily understand what your point is when you're sketching, you just need to sketch. And if you're lucky something will happen in the process that leads to the next thing. That's what all this is about—working with abandon on mark making and color blending and just seeing where things go. Sometimes you'll arrive at a useful destination in a hour (or less) sometimes you'll work on something for days, weeks, months. You keep working because your mind and your hand tell you to keep working. It's like a dog worrying a bone.
We all need to do a bit more of this in our lives, which are too full of instant messages and cell phones and bits of data.
I like to call this productive play. It's not just a linguistical trick on my part to play and call it something else. When you start delving into a technique you don't like (I really don't like pencils much) and pushing it you find out things about yourself and your approach that are helpful. So that is productive. And as I've been stressing in several posts, it all happens while playing. It's thoughtful play—if I do this, what then, and if that happens how will this work and then what happens when I add this…
So maybe it is more aptly called questioning play? Heck, it's productive and it's fun. You know it's going to get you somewhere. Sometimes the "where" you go is a place you don't ever want to go again and that's fine too. Go have some productive play
