Picture This

Posted by Melissa Dow in Visual Arts

Communication Design Department head Luke Dorman recently hosted a free-draw event playfully titled: You Can’t Draw and Neither Can We. The Sept. 28 event pulled in approximately 20 people from all departments. When asked about the expectations of the event and how it went, Dorman said, “I want to try establish a better sense of community. It [the event] was a strange idea to pursue, but I heard a lot of laugher, which was my goal.”

Dorman lead attendees in a few exercises to get them going. The first was a group exercise, in which everyone tried to black out an entire page with marker—while blindfolded. In this case, the students put on funny hats over their eyes. A lot of people got marker ink on their hands but they had fun scribbling on the page.

Dorman hung up the finished work on the walls after each exercise. He lead the group in one last exercise then let everyone free draw or pick from the sheet of drawing exercises he had handed out. The next exercise was an attempt to draw a portrait of someone without looking at the page. Dorman called it, “Blind contour: making the connection between what you’re seeing and what you’re doing with your hand.”

Students had a lot of fun doing these exercises and impressing people with how bad their drawings were. True to its name, the drawings were so bad it was funny, but this event wasn’t about the content people produced but the process in which it was created. Dorman encouraged the students to, “craft processes for yourself that drive the work you create.” This advice not only applies to the visual arts but any artistic skill. The creative process is often underrated or left behind all together, but creating an environment or time of day to sit down, have fun, and not care what you’re producing, is an important part of the creative process.