Affirmation and Relaxation Drawing

1. Intro: Welcome to relaxation and affirmation through art. I'm ebonite IC. I'm a professional artists and arts educator. One of my favorite things about drawing is how can help me be really present and relaxed? Drawn can also help me self-regulate when I'm not feeling so present and relaxed. It can give me something to do with my hands and something to occupy me in a positive way. In this class, we will take some time and space to just enjoy drawing. We're going to set a special word and intention for ourselves and use that as a jumping off point for our art. I've done this project with kids and adults of all ages with people who are professional artists and people who don't consider themselves artists at all. This class is appropriate for all levels of comfort and experience with drawing. I'm so excited to draw with you. 2. Art Supplies: Here are the supplies you'll need. So first off is paper. I recommend Bristol paper. It's nice and thick and satisfying to draw on. However, computer paper or sketchbook paper also are totally fine. Here, you'll see it's nice and thick and soft. I'm a really big fan of Bristol paper. Next up is a pencil. I love a mechanical pencil because you get a nice fine tip. You also will need an eraser, as well as my favorite part, a set of markers. So you'll want fine tip markers. These ones are 0.3 millimeters. I really like the super fine tip, but you can get a variety. You can also do this project with your favorite pen. So don't, don't worry if you don't have markers, you can still participate with just one color. The following supplies are optional. You can get a printout of the word that you'll choose. We'll talk about that in the next section. So for that you'd need a printer as well as paper and a computer. You also, this is optional. You may want a ruler or straight edge, or even like a book that has a 90 degree angle. A sketchbook or a regular book will help you if you're wanting to make sure that the letters in your word are all aligned. The last thing would be a light box or a window for your tracing. 3. Choosing Your Word: What do you need to hear today? Is there a word or a phrase that would be soothing to you or would empower you, or just make you feel good? How can you take care of yourself for your first time trying this experience, I would go with one single word. So what do you want to cultivate? What do you need more of? Or what do you need to be reminded of? Do you need to be reminded to rest? Do you want to cultivate more joy? Do you want to be more gentle with yourself? Are you hoping to grow your bravery or your boldness? Maybe your word came to you like immediately, as soon as I said, pick a word exactly what your word was gonna be. That's great. Or maybe you're not really sure where to start. That's also great. So we're going to do some exercises or you can choose an exercise to do that will help you find your word. The first one is you can just grab a piece of paper and just like let words come to mind. It doesn't have to be your word. It can just be like what words come out of you and then you can go back over those. And circle ones that resonate or are ones that you're drawn to. Your second option is another kind of writing journaling option, where you'll set an alarm for set an alarm for five-minutes or if that feels like Too much time, you can set an alarm for one minute and you can use the journaling prompt. What would soothe me? Or what am I most proud of? So what would suit me? What am I most proud of, or what would I like to cultivate? What would I need? You can kind of tailor it to yourself. Make sure that you're not tailoring it in a way that is being hard on yourself. Like, not like, what am I doing wrong and not What am I? What do I need less of if you're not in the mood to write? Also totally fine. Sometimes I find clearing my thoughts by just focusing on my breath or meditating on a specific question can help me get there. So let's do some on square breathing or box breathing, which is just an equal amount you inhale for. Let's do three counts. So you'll inhale for three accounts. You'll hold the breath for three counts. You'll exhale for three counts, and then you'll hold the breath for three counts. So I'll go first, I'll do a little example. So I'm going to show you my breathing by counting like this. Okay? So in, hold, out, hold. It might feel better for you to do four counts. So let's try that together. In. Hold out. Do that at your own pace. Slow as you'd like, or like quicker if that feels better to you, doesn't always feel good to hold a really long breath. So listen to your body and just kinda focus in. You can, if you'd like, set an alarm for one minute, two minutes, three minutes, four minutes, five minutes. And just see at the end how you feel. And if a word comes up for you, if a word doesn't come up for you, also, fine. Do your name, Do your favorite letter, do your favorite food, whatever. It's totally open and there's not really a wrong answer here. 4. Writing Your Word: Now that you have your word, it's time to write it. We have a few different options for how to do that. The first is you can take your Bristol paper and you can just free hand, draw it, freehand, write it. Your word needs to be in like bubble letters because we're going to either fill in the positive space on the inside or the positive space around the word. So it needs to have some space for that. So that's option one. You're just going to freehand draw your word. Option two is you can use a ruler or a even a book with just like a flat edge to help you create a couple of lines. So when you kind of free hand write your word, you had a little bit of structure if that feels good to you. I like to use a ruler to just make sure all of my letters will be the same height. All these lines will be erased. Then I find the center and write my word out. I'll start with the central letter, or if it's even the two central letters and move out from the center. I find this really helpful to make sure there's enough room for everything. Letters are all the right size and that it's centered. Option number three is, you can go on your computer, pick a font that you like, and you can write your word. And you can print that out. And you can, if you have a light table, you can use that. If you don't have a light table, you can just go to a window. Put your go to a window and you can put your word on the window if you'd like. You can even take your word on the window. Lay your Bristol paper over it. You see, you can see through. And you're going to just trace that with the pencil. Pretty, pretty simple and easy on. Your trace will likely not look beautiful. It's a little awkward to draw up like this, and that's okay. The pencil lines are all going to be erased. We're just using the pencil lines as our map for where Draw with our markers or where not to draw. 5. Positive and Negative Space: We're going to talk about positive space and negative space. So first we're going to take a look right here. Again, our word joy. The black ink is the positive space. That's the space that's filled. So all the space around it, all the whitespace is negative space, It's empty space. And the balance between the negative space and the positive space is what creates the image, right? You can't look balanced thing is you can't have one without the other. The opposite of this here is same word, but here the word is the negative space the ink is filling in. It's all filled up. That's the positive space. So we're also, we're doing the same thing where we're creating an image by having some heartfelt and some part empty. So for our drawings, what that's gonna look like, also the word joy. So this will start with this one. Actually. This one. The word is the positive space, the word is built and then the negative space all around it is what makes the word visible. So let's see here. This is the opposite of that. The word here, Joy is the negative space and filled in all around it. Makes it visible. Yeah. Okay, cool. So either one is great. For your first go. You may want to do the word as your positive space. It's a little less drawing area. And that can feel like less pressure if you're someone who feels a little overwhelmed by filling a lot of space, and then for your second one, you try it the other way. So whatever is calling to you, whatever is feeling good to you, is what you should do. 6. Design Ideas: Now that you've drawn your word and pencil, and you've decided if you're going to create the positive space or the filled up space inside the word or outside of the word. It's time to talk about what we're going to fill it with. So we're essentially going to be doodling. If you want to fill your whole space with the same repetitive shape, you could do circles. It could just be circles that you're repeating it different sizes. And it'll look really cool. Like it's really a kind of now that you've drawn your word in pencil and you've decided if you're going to fill the word, or if you're going to fill around the word, you, it's time to talk about what we're going to fill it with. So we're going to essentially be doodling on your good here if you can draw a simple circle shape. So we're going to create what I like to call a well of doodles. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna take our word. So my word is joy. Whatever. Our designs are going to be, essentially doodles like really simple, repeated kind of drawings. Before we start growing, we're going to create a well of doodles. We don't want to feel stuck. We want this to feel really flowing and enjoyable. And one way for things to go smoothly and feel enjoyable is to prepare a little bit. So we are going to first take our word. My word is joy. And we're going to take a piece of our paper, or Bristol paper or whatever computer paper you have. And we're going to set our phone alarm or what if you watch alarm, whatever for 60 seconds. And we're going to write down whatever that word makes us think of. So for example, I'm going to spit ball. Joy. Plants make me feel joyful. Flowers make me feel joyful. The beach and water make me feel joyful. Sunshine. It's just like it can be physical things or it can be colors, whatever kinds of things come up for you that relate to your word. So okay, so we're gonna take 60 seconds and we're gonna go ahead and do that. Now. You're going to create four to six boxes and you'll pick whichever words resonated with you most from that brainstorming. And we're going to create a vocabulary of visual vocabulary for each word. You can do this just from your head. That's an awesome way to do it. You can also look up pictures if you want, if you want to look up inspiration, or if you want to look up how other artists have drawn like a simplified version of that thing. That's not cheating. That's all great stuff to do if you'd like to do that. So let's get going. 7. Color Pallate: It's now time to pick our colors. So if you, if you're just doing this, if you don't have markers and you're just doing it with a pen, then no worries. You are going to focus more on like the different shapes than using different colors. If you've got your markers, you can choose to use every single color. Or you can choose to use a limited color palette. So a limited color palette means you're just selecting a few colors. That can be two colors or it could be five colors or eight colors or whatever. You're just limiting the colors you're using so that your image will just feel a little more cohesive. It's kinda like a nice little trick you can use like if you wanted. For example, if your word was calm, like personally I associate calm feelings with like blues and greens. So you might pick a color palette like that. If you are, if your word was more like a really bold word, or if it was boldness or joy or something, you might want to pick really bright colors, you know. And they can be, cover a wide variety of colors. Again, really like a wrong or right answer here. If you, if you're in the mood today and it's gonna make you feel good to use whatever colors you feel like. Do it if your favorite color is blue and that's super soothing to you, then just like get all the blues out and just use those. Cool. 8. Creating Your Drawing: All ready to get going now, so find a comfortable spot and set the mood right for yourself. This is some new time. Take this moment again to ask yourself what you need. Do you need some quiet? Do you need time? We were focusing on just one thing. Then. Enjoy that some people really enjoy listening to a podcast or music, or even having a TV show on in the background while they draw. That's great too. If connection is something you're looking for right now, you can call a friend up or you can go by herself to a public space to do your art. Go to your favorite coffee shop or a park. You might even want to bring this piece with you to work or to the DMV as a way of positively filling some like boring time or kinda like taking a little bit of view time when you're busy. This is about you and what you need and what feels good to you. So there's not one right answer for everybody about how to do mindful drawing. Some helpful tips across the board though, our work on a hard surface. So if you if you're wanting to go out to a park or somewhere where there might not be a table. You can take a big book or your, even your Bristol board with you. It's nice. It has like a cardboard back. The other thing to think about his posture sometimes if I'm drawing for a long time, I find myself doing this and then it hurts my back and that's not good for anybody. And then the third thing is a drink lots of water that has nothing to do with your drawing. It's just something that I needed to be reminded of today. So you get the reminder to Great, Enjoy your art and I cannot wait to see what you create. Pro tip. You might want to erase your pencil lines somewhat just so you can still see them. I didn't do that here, but if you kind of want to have a sense of what the final product will look like. You can have light pencil lines to just sort of guide you without it, without it being outlined. Another pro tip concerning your pencil lines. If you don't erase them a bit beforehand, you're going to want to wait until your markers are fully dry before you erase them. Otherwise, you will smudge your markers. You keep watching this video. You'll see me get a little too excited and make that exact mistake a little later in the video. You can also look up and see the bottom of my well sheet or my idea sheet. I have it right under my painting, right, sorry, right under my drawing. So that if I get stuck, I can maintain a flow by just looking up and picking one of my designs to add. And I ended up going with a somewhat limited color palette. Use a lot of bright colors, reds, pinks, purples. Then I decided to use green in every letter as well. Because that just that goes with my word, makes me really feel joyful and happy those colors. And I use the same colors in every letter rather than different colors in different letters, and that makes it feel really cohesive. So while I'm using the same colors, I end up using some of the same images. But a lot of different images. It's the colors that really make it feel cohesive. I'm alright, well, enjoy your drawings. I cannot wait to see what you create. You can post them in the class on Skillshare, or you can always find me on Instagram at Fox and crow paper co, or find me on my website, www dot foxing Crow art.com. And you can send me a message there. Alright, Enjoy. 9. Conclusion: Thank you so much for joining me for some relaxation and affirmation time. Now it's time to find a place for your art. Would you like to hang it on the wall? Would seeing it be a reminder to you of taking time for yourself or to cultivate whatever it is that you'd like to cultivate in your life. Would it feel good to stick it in a book so you could find it later? Would it feel good to cut it out and collage it onto something or give it as a gift. Would it feel good to burn it? I don't know. Whatever, whatever feels right to you is the right thing to do with your art. So the one thing I will say is is like take a moment and look at it and take a nice deep breath. And really appreciate yourself for taking time to do something just for you. You can't pour from an empty cup. So if you're taking time to take care of yourself, That's good Even of itself, but it's also great for everybody around you, right? I would love to see your word and hear about your experience. You can post your art here on Skillshare, can also contact me on Instagram, I'm Fox and crow paper co. You can also message me through my website, foxing Crow art.com. Please leave an honest review of this class and let me know if there are any other classes you'd like to see from me in the future or projects you'd like to do together. Thanks so much and have a great day. Bye.