Hi everyone! I hope you’re all doing well! For this week’s blog post, I want to talk about an exercise I’ve been doing a lot this summer. I didn’t come up with this, and I’m sure many of you have done it before. I’m not aware of a specific name or purpose, but I do this exercise in various ways; most recently, I’ve been using it to relax and analyze my thoughts. This activity consists of scribbling, rounding out intersecting lines to create organic shapes, and filling those shapes in. I’ll show you some examples I’ve done and walk you through the process if you’ve never done it before.
Firstly, I have created some examples that may help you find a starting point. There are many ways to approach this activity, but I’ll walk you through a smaller version to get started. Regardless of what you want to get out of this, it’s all going to start with the same structure. I’ll talk about the different ways you can use this later. Here is an example of just the structure as well as a completed piece.
To begin, you’ll need paper, a black marker or colored pencil, and any other material you want to fill in your shapes. I usually prefer to use a permanent marker because it’s more efficient when rounding out your lines, and it won’t bleed into your shapes. Other than that, it’s up to you!
Next, take your marker or pencil and draw a continuous line across your paper, eventually covering your start and end points so that they aren’t visible. The more you overlap your lines, the more intersections you will have to round out.
Now that your continuous line is completed, you’re going to find every time a line intersects and round it out with your marker or colored pencil. By this, I mean that you don’t want to see any sharp angles. Or you can think about it as finding shapes within the negative space and rounding them out. You can also fill in any negative space with black if it’s too small to round out.
Your structure is now completed, and you can start to fill in your shapes with color. For the example I’m showing you today, I think of my structure as my brain, and each of the shapes represents a thought that I have, along with a corresponding color. For example, the gray shape represents how the rainy weather in New York is making me gloomy; the pink represents the primary color of the shop where I work, and the blue represents my pool, which I’m excited to use once the weather improves. Some of the thoughts I’m illustrating are very significant, and some aren’t, but they all have a place in my brain. You can also just choose colors that you like or create an image within the shapes. It’s challenging for me to provide a complete list of options because there are countless directions you can take.
When you’ve filled in all of your shapes or have taken some other creative route, you’re all done! As I mentioned, it is a simple approach to achieving excellent results. I hope you all enjoyed this exercise if you participated!
Please let me know what you think in the comments below and if you used this structure in a way that I didn’t mention. Have a great week, and continue being creative 🙂
-Jenna