Many people have mentioned that lockdown changed some if not all aspects of their creative lives this past year. It has been the same for me but in quite a surprising and unplanned way. I spent most of my available time writing and publishing books for the past ten years or so, but at the end of 2019, I decided to use 2020 to focus almost exclusively on improving my artistic skills.
I have been drawing and painting since 2015, but my primary focus had been to write and publish my books. With 25 books now published, I felt the need to change focus. Udemy courses, and TheVirtualInstructor.com, have been my primary sources of training and practice, but it was inktober52 that provided the challenge to take my ink drawing to another level with a weekly prompt for the entire year.
Then Covid-19 struck, and another dimension of art made its way into my life: teaching art to others. The teaching part did not scare me, as I have been training engineers over the years, but art? How does someone who is still learning herself going to teach others, and within the constraints of hard lockdown too? Although I was still learning, I have also learned that I preferred dry art mediums, except ink and wash, where I like the use of watercolour for urban sketching and landscapes. Now I was asked to teach others who might prefer painting. You might say that I could have declined, but it was lockdown and they are my friends, so I decided to do it to see how it would go.
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| 3D dragonfly in my art journal |
The first obstacle was the lack of face-to-face opportunities as I would have preferred to teach. It makes the feedback and personal attention so much easier to manage because they were all at different skill levels. One friend is more skilled than I am, but the others were real beginners, so you can understand my predicament. The experienced friend helped out where I needed help when it came to the painting mediums.
Of course, the most basic skill is to learn to draw and while I focused on that, everyone was itching to use the mediums they had, received from family, or could purchase online. A day or so of contemplation on how to do this, I came to the idea of using art journaling to get the ball rolling.
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| Quote from Marcus Aurelius printed on acetate |
And it worked. The first six weeks were the hardest and yet we all came through it with our sanity intact, and a few more skills.
Teaching art skills during the lockdown
At first, I used WhatsApp and email. Since we are friends, it was a simple process of coming up with an idea, provide everyone with an example that I drew, or a link to a video from a website like YouTube or a free Udemy course. Videos made up for the lack of live demonstrations.
As lockdown progressed and people became more comfortable with online meetings, we moved our daily challenges to a weekly online meeting where I could demonstrate a new technique they were not yet familiar with, or we could chat and come up with new projects or mediums to tackle.
Before the online sessions, I found several photographs online (not always royalty-free, but I warned everyone about sharing their projects on social media) with increasing levels of difficulty to draw.
With the online sessions via Google Meet (thank you Google for keeping it free!) we made our challenging project to date: a lapbook where we can add a journal and another book such as a sketchbook, to continue our creative practice.
In South Africa, we are now on day 277 since lockdown started, and as I look back over this time of stress and anxiety, I think that our time was well spent in dealing with the effects of the pandemic by doing something of value to ourselves.
The road ahead: 2021
From a personal perspective, I am busy learning oil painting (and not yet sure that I like the medium, although it might too early to tell), finished the last of the weekly inktober52 drawings, after completing the inktober 31 daily drawing challenge in October.
My almost daily creative practice will continue with more art journaling, drawing and painting. I may even write another book!
You can also follow my #CreativeLife with regular updates on Twitter (#TheTinyBroom).
Stay safe and healthy, until next time!
●︙● Linzé 🇿🇦💜
