Inventing ideas: Numbers into Portraits

You can just draw with simple ideas. In this case I put numbers and equations randomly on a page. Then by extending some of the lines, and by adding stuff, I’m drawing until an image is suggested.

This kind of play is vital and helps your creativity. This solves the problem of wanting to draw but having no subject. Sometimes you have a strong desire to draw but the subject evades you. Or the subject is disconnected somehow. This also allows you to channel some love into line, line for its own sake, or color; the love of the elements themselves. I love a really good line, I enjoy carving the line into the paper. This is a way in, so you are not stopped by not having a subject. Maybe the subject is drawing.

What is stopping you? Find a detour around it.

Relative Trees. Watercolor, ink, pencil on grey paper. 2020.

A band of tree-like forms all drawn together, side by side. The tops of the trees are stylized and abstract, almost like letter forms, but also like strange cartooned figures. The branches have been reduced to a line and placed in the centers of the trunks, and placed in the spaces between the trees, compacting the space, slowing the cadence. I’m especially fond of the bottom, where the land shape becomes another tree at the far right. The bars along the bottom make a playful road. The pebbled texture of the grey paper shows up in the pencil shading, not alluding to light and shadow, just a design element. The darkest watercolor shapes start the action on the left side, and finish it at the right.