Day 33 - Ch 7-9 - Drawing on Artist Within

In chapter 7 Edwards demonstrates analog drawing with her students’ drawings on an eight grid piece of paper.  Each of the 8 grids are labeled with feeling words such as anger, joy, peace, illness. The students draw in each of the grid to demonstrate their interpretation of the emotion.  Edwards shows the drawings of her students to demonstrate how these emotions are similar to others.  She encourages the reader to also do the exercise, drawing and then comparing their lines to her students examples.  The exercise uses a pencil to draw marks within each of the sections, expressing for example, what anger feels like.  She suggests the reader think about a time when they were angry, letting the emotion flow down their arm and onto the page.  An analog drawing is using only lines, no identified shapes.  Edwards presents how the language of line is seen as “anger lines are often dark, heavy, jagged” contrasted with joy or peace where the lines are light, curved, rising or falling.   She reviews the eight emotions she had her students draw and displays how similar each emotion is when drawn.  She concludes there is vocabulary of the visual language and compares the works of Matisse, Rembrandt, Picasso, etc.  Edwards takes the reader through Chapters 8 & 9 with exercises using the analog drawing to further an understanding of how the language of line assists one to discover new ways of seeing old problems.

I encourage you to buy a copy of Drawing on the Artist Within for a better understanding of your own creative process.  Whether you're a master artist or beginning artist, this is an excellent book.

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