Project: Artist Diary - Day 5 (Being day 10 of Gameplan)
Start with an image!
This is day 5 of Artist Diary, today’s dispatch is titled Start with an image. You can check out the entire Gameplan here.
If you’ve not done Day 1, please start there.
Project Notes: This is the last assignment for the Artist Diary project. i encourage you to pick one of these methods as your default go to method and spend 10 minutes a day, filling a spread in your diary, over time this will evolve into something completly unique… don’t rush to get there, let it happen organically, in the chat some people have shared their unique practices.
My aim here is to get you started or started again. Your job is to pick something that gets you excited to do daily, see it as a pleasure not a chore.
We’ll break for 2 days, use that time to review the 10 dispatches we’ve gone through already, try any of the assignments you missed, engage with the others in the group, and keep going in your artist diary.
I will check in with you over the weekend but there won’t be an assignment. Next week I’ll be sharing some drawing tools and ideas that really helped me improve in a short time. it’s going to take practice for sure. My hope is that knowing what to practice will be a big help.
With that all out of the way,
Shall we go?… Let’s go!
Welcome to day 5:
Start with an image
Tony Buzan famously emphasized starting a mind map in the centre of a blank, horizontal page, stating that this gives your brain …
“freedom to spread out in all directions and to express itself more freely and naturally”
In his mind mapping technique, he teaches us to explore our mind on the page by creating a map. Using his techniques I once went from 4th last in class, to 4th, securing a place in one of the ‘good’ classes in high school.
We’re often told to use our brains, but not often told how. Mind mapping, and specifically starting with an image, is one way to do that.
Interestingly Lynda Barry also teaches us to start with an image. And she calls an image a place.
In one of her exercises she asks us to imagine a specific car. This provides the center all image. Then she ask us to picture ourselves as the viewer, and write from that perspective (you can also draw but writing is faster).
Where are you she asks? Inside or outside, behind or in front, what’s to your left, right, above, below. What’s behind you and ahead of you.
Where Tony Buzan introduced a map. Lynda Barry brings you on a guided tour, to the place where images are. And she teaches you how to go there.
These two methods are ways to use our brains, our whole brain, that requires all that logic and reasoning, but also requires, imagination.