About 6 weeks ago I spent a couple of days immersing myself in creative prompts from “Drawing from Poems” by Chloe Briggs from Drawing is Free. I find that Chloe’s exercises provide a gentle motivation to play and explore in ways I wouldn’t think of by myself. I am also comforted by the thought of all the other subscribers around the world working with similar ideas. Whether you are starting out or have been making pictures for decades I highly recommend signing up for Chloe’s very affordable monthly drawing booklets on Patreon.
Chloe suggested working through this project over 24 hours so as not to overthink it! Here are some photos and notes on the process I followed.
Choose a poem. Mine was “As are you” by local poet, painter and dear friend Kirstie McKinnon from her book “Songs from the Water” 2020
Transcribe the poem by hand. I divided the poem into three sections and used coloured watercolour pencils on some damp offcuts of thick watercolour paper I had saved - i knew I would eventually find a use for those scraps!
Identify some of the key images in the poem. I selected “storm”, “split trees”, “rose” and “stars”.
Search the keywords in the public domain for images that resonate. These are the images I found which include “Gathering Storm” by Albert Bierstadt and “Small Roses in the Yard” by Nguyen Dai Thang.
Draw or paint freely from these images and pin them up in the sequence of the poem. At this point I became interested in arranging the four images and three sections of the poem from right to left as well as left to right.
I decided to make a concertina book on both sides of some strips of the thick damp watercolour paper with the images flowing into each other from both directions. The storm became a stage for the split tree which became a rose branch reaching into a day “spun with stars”. I experimented with grinding rock salt into the wet blue of the sky. Embedding watercolour and gouache on both sides of the damp paper right to the ripped edges reminded me of felted textiles.
I remembered I still had some scraps of cotton rag paper I had made from beating old hospital sheets into handmade paper about 40 years ago! I washed watercolour on these, tore the edges and hand-wrote the three sections of the poem onto the fragments. Then I pasted these on to the images of the concertina book, working in reverse as well.
I worked on three little concertina booklets and gifted two of them to Kirstie. Here they are, front and back, all variations on each other.
