Transcripts
1. Introduction: This is a topic that I really wanted to
share with you today because I've been
drawing patterns as a daily practice for
the last 18 months now, and I've seen the huge benefits that I get from this practice. It's so simple, it's accessible to anyone no matter what your level
of skill or experience, and it's just such
a great way of introducing some more
calm into your lives. Hi, I'm Mel Rye, and I'm an illustrator
and teacher. You might know my
work from Instagram or you may have seen it for
different client work that I've done for arts
trails or book covers, or you may have seen my
classes here on Skillshare. Today's class is about exploring drawing patterns as a really powerful
tool for mindfulness. In today's class,
we are going to be exploring some different ways
that we can draw patterns, and we'll also explore some mindful drawing techniques that you can practice
along the way. I hope that from
today's session, you're going to take away
some techniques that you can incorporate into
your drawing practice that can help you explore mindfulness
through your drawing. Something to note, this
class was recorded live, and I got to interact
with the students whilst I was working. Let's do this.
2. Opening Meditation: Hello everybody. I
am Dylan Morrison. I'm a writer and editor
in Cleveland, Ohio. I am thrilled to be
here hosting Mel Rye, who is a brilliant artist, who's going to
teach us all about drawing mindful
patterns this morning. With that, Mel, I'm going to go ahead and turn
it over to you. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much everyone
for joining me today. I really appreciate
you coming along to listen and watch and join in. Today what I want to talk
to you about is using drawing patterns as a really powerful
tool for mindfulness. I have always drawn patterns. I think most of us probably do, because we all doodle and those tend to be
quite pattern based. But in the last 12-18 months, I've been a bit more intentional about the way that I've
been drawing patterns. It's become actually
a daily practice for me and through the process of
doing that daily practice, there's quite a few things
that I've picked up about the mindful aspects
of drawing patterns, and that's what I want
to share with you today, so that you can practice
mindful drawing at home and get all the
amazing benefits that the practice has to offer. The class, we're
going to be dividing it up into three sections. Firstly, we're going to
talk about inspiration. We'll do a short mindful awareness exercise
that I'll guide you through to draw inspiration
from our surroundings. Then we're going
to take what we do from that exercise, and we're going to
use the shapes that we explore in mindful
awareness exercise, and then in the second part, we're going to play around
with some really simple shapes to see how using just
one simple shape, you can use it in lots
of different ways to incorporate into your
pattern drawings. Then in the third
section of the class, we are going to do a
circular mindful pattern drawing together, so that you can try out all
the tips and techniques that we've covered and you
can ask any questions. I hope that you're going
to really enjoy it. Well, that sounds incredible. Did you want to go ahead and lead us into our first exercise? Yeah, absolutely.
Before we begin, just in terms of what you're going to need today
to do the class, you can draw with absolutely
anything that you have. I'm just going to be using simple black pen on white paper, purely because it shows up
better for you guys on camera. But if you want to be
drawing with colored pens, drawing on colored paper using
different media, pencil, watercolors, whatever
you feel happy with, that's the most important
thing really is that you're using a material that's
familiar to you, so that you don't feel like
it's stressing you out because it's something
that you used to using. You can use a sketchbook
or loose sheets of paper, print paper, or scrap paper. Before we begin
our first section to class in our mindful
awareness exercise, it's good if you just
have to hand something to draw with and some paper
as we go through it, so that you're not looking for that as we go through
the exercise. Just a few things
about inspiration. What we're going to be doing is we're just going to draw
some inspiration from our surroundings and use that
inspiration to create what I have called a shape library
in my daily practice. I think sometimes what can be a really big barrier
for us in any drawing, whether it's drawing for
ourselves or drawing for a client or any drawing, is that looking for, well, what do we draw? Where does the
inspiration come from? What I have enjoyed doing in my daily practice is actually using what I
call the shape library, which is basically
a collection of shapes which we can use as a really simple tool
to go to and pick a shape and work with that shape to create
some patterns from. That's what we're going
to be doing on our paper. But the way that I'd like
us to go about that is to just do a really short
mindful awareness exercise. This is something that
I really enjoy doing actually as part of my
daily drawing practice. I think sometimes
just slowing down and doing some
deep breathing and just visualizations can
really just help to punctuate that drawing time and separate it from the business
of the rest of our lives. What I'm going to
ask you to do is just if you feel comfy doing
so you can close your eyes, but if you'd rather not, you can keep them open. I just want you to just take
some really deep breaths and however slowly or quickly
feels natural for you. Just try to slow down
from whatever it is you've been doing. It's like arriving at
your drawing practice. You're thinking, okay, so I have been doing that, but now this is something else. Then as you are just slowly
breathing in and out, I want you to just
imagine visually that you're gathering up all of the things that
are in your mind, your thoughts and to
do less and anxieties, and I want you to just
imagine that you're breathing them out with
a really long exhale. As you continue to keep
breathing in and out, when you have the
next long exhale, I want you to try to imagine any tension in
your body releasing. We all hold tension in
different places in our body, it might be your
shoulders or arms. If it feels good, you can do a little shake with your arms or shake of the head and just imagine that physical
tension leaving your body. Next, I want you to bring
your awareness to where the parts of your body in contact with the
ground or the table, and just notice the sensations
of feeling grounded.
3. Make Your Shape Library: If you can then just
bring your awareness to any sounds or anything
that you're aware of, so you're starting to become
aware of your surroundings. If you've got your eyes closed, you can open your eyes
and just start to look around you for what can you see when
you open your eyes, just try and look at
your surroundings with a slightly different mindset. What we're looking for are
shapes that are around us. These can be super
simple shapes, they don't need to be
anything complicated at all. For example, on my desk, I've got a lot of
circles because I've got cups with pens in and my pen lids are
circular and I've got some tape here,
which is circular. A circle would be an example
of a shape that I can see. Then if I look in more detail, I can see that there are
some rectangles as well. I've got some pens, for example, that have got different
patterns on them. I could start looking at the more specific details of the objects that are around me. Now, on your piece of paper
that's in front of you, we're going to start to
make our shape library. All I want you to do
is basically start recording the shapes that
you can see around you. They don't need to be neat, no one's going to
see these shapes, it's just for your
own reference, so don't worry about
what they look like. I'm going to start with
my circle and rectangle. Then start to look for more
shapes that you can see. Again, they don't need to
be complicated at all. I can see some zigzags, for example, in my pencil case, so I will include a zigzag
on my shape library. I've got my computer
keyboard over there, so the keys are mostly squares, so I will record a square. There's also some other shapes
of keys on my keyboard, so I might add some of those. Got some hexagonal
pen lids as well. The idea with this exercise
is to give us the material to work with primarily so that when we're coming
to our pattern drawings, we don't feel like we're
searching for inspiration, we've already got some things
that we can work with. Another reason why this is a really helpful exercise to do is I think it can really help us to slow down and to notice the things that
are around us and start looking at
things differently. Actually, I think sometimes when we are about to start a drawing, when we're faced with
that blank page, sometimes we can go into a
bit of a panic and think, "Oh my gosh, what am
I going to draw?" You start thinking, "Oh, I need to go and google some
staff to see what it is that I'm going to work on today." Then we get lost in a rabbit hole of looking at things and looking
at inspiration. This is one way that I really like to close down
some of those channels by really reducing
the amount of inputs. All these shapes are
literally within about one-and-a-half meters
of me at the moment, and I think that can be
quite a helpful thing to do to just give us
that kind of content. If you feel like you don't
have many shapes around you, just expand your awareness
a little bit wider, so you could start
looking towards the outer edges of
wherever you are, look at the door and look at the window and
what you can see through the door and the window
so that you can start to just fill up a page
with shapes basically. If you get to a point of
feeling like you have maybe exhausted what you can see in your immediate
surrounding, you can start using imagined or remembered
shapes as well. There's no wrong or
right way of doing this, it's just to start us off creating a bank of shapes
that we can start to use. It may be that once you've drawn some shapes,
you could think, well actually I
quite like that one, but I could adapt that
and make it different. For example, I use
scallops quite a lot and this is a standard scallop, but I could make a really tall, long, thin scallop, or I could make a really
wide scallop shape as well. These will all be things
that you could use in different ways in
your pattern drawing, which you can adapt
them as we go and create some
interesting shapes. It's especially useful
grounding exercise just in terms of really centering you
in the place that you are. Yeah, I think that's the thing. One of the real benefits about pattern drawing
specifically, I think, as a way of drawing
from mindfulness is that you can do a drawing
that takes you 30 seconds, or you could spend three
hours on a drawing. It's so adaptable to fill
how much time you have. I started it in a time where I really have no time
to create for myself. It was for that reason
because I could squeeze these drawings into a very
small amount of time. It really worked for
me at that stage. I feel as though you may be only able to
draw for 10 minutes, but if you can
just give yourself a few deep breaths
before you start drawing and just try to mentally change your frame of mind
from whatever you were doing and being busy
to just slowing down, I think it has a
really huge impact on how you feel as well as
the drawing aspect of it, that just taking that
pause before you begin is something that
I really encourage. That's really good advice. [LAUGHTER] I hope so.
4. Working With Circles: In this next exercise, what we are going to do is I want to show you how
you can use one simple shape or collection of shapes in a really wide range of different ways and
I'll also show you some mindful drawing
techniques that I like to use whilst
drawing some of the shapes that really helps
me to get the most out of the aspect of the
mindful drawing. You can keep drawing
on the same page as your shape library or you can start a new page if you prefer. [NOISE] The first shape
that I'd like us to play with is circles. When we come to our
circular pattern drawing in the third
section of the class, this practicing circles
will come in really handy. There's some specific reasons
why circles are great to work with a mindful
drawing practice. In terms of the symbolism of circles it's actually
really interesting. They are connected
with feelings of wholeness and harmony,
protection and unity. The term mandala actually
translated means circle. There's something
really nice about working in a circular shape. You may find the idea of drawing circles really horrifying
because it's very hard to draw circles at times
but this is another thing that I try to incorporate
into my circle drawing a lot, is this idea of letting
go of perfection. Circles, they
represent perfection, in that perfect shape of the
circle. It's very varied. You can never really draw a perfect circle free-handed.
It is really difficult. It's a really
interesting thing to press ourselves to do
from that perspective of, well, it's not going to
look like a perfect circle, so we're just going
to embrace that. We're going to try a few
different things with circles. The first thing that I
would like you to try is drawing some
concentric circles. Concentric circles, it
basically just means you draw a small circle and then you draw another circle
outside it and another one outside that and you keep going and you can
get bigger and bigger. This is going to form the
structure of our pattern in the third part of the class so it's helpful
to practice that. We're trying to
draw the circles so that they don't touch the
circle we've already drawn. But they don't need to
be perfect circles. That's all part of the charm. They can be very wonky, they can be squashed, they can be very oval. In terms of a mindful exercise, this is one that I think works really beautifully with circles. One thing that I would
recommend that you try as we're drawing circles and actually you can apply
this to any shape and any part of your drawing
when we're drawing today, is to try to focus
your attention on the spot where you begin
and end the circle. You're bringing your focus to this point where the
circle begins and keeping your attention
on that as you draw the circle until it's completed. As soon as that
circle is completed, then bring your attention
to where you're going to begin the next circle and so on. The reason why this is a really helpful mindful
drawing exercise is because it gives our brains something else to be doing as well as just drawing. Because what we're trying to do with mindful drawing is to
keep us present in what we're doing and we're all very busy all the
time and our minds are so active and it's very easy to be drawing something and doing something
with your hands, but actually your mind
is elsewhere and it's thinking about what
you going to do later. Bringing in these
little extra exercises which I'll talk about
another one or two of those, it can really just help to make our brain stay in
the drawing and not wander off to
our to-do list or anything else that
is on our mind. It can just help to keep
us focused a little bit. What else we could
try with circles? Well, we could try drawing
circles that touch. This is another exercise that I like to use in my
mindful drawing practice is, if you're drawing
separate shapes, if you make them touch, that's another helpful way of just making your
brain focus on something which will hopefully stop it from being
somewhere else. You can of course do
that in different ways; so you could do a row of
circles or you could do a cluster of different
sized circles that are all touching and you could also draw other
shapes inside the circles. Maybe I will go back to
this row and I might draw some squares inside the circle. Maybe I will draw a
circle inspired by my plant here that maybe has some lines on it so
it's a bit like a leaf. We could draw other shapes or patterns inside of a circle. Let's do a concentric circle
and square combination. You can do exactly
the same exercise with any shape that you choose. The reason I want to do circles today is just
because it's going to help us out in the third
part of the class and because our drawings will be
based on a circular design, but you could totally just explore any shape
in the same way. Think about how
you can do lots of triangles together or hexagons, or really any shape. I'll try overlapping. It's quite a nice
one to explore. Maybe a concentric, but it's
not evenly spaced so it creates a slightly
three-dimensional effect. These are touching. It's cool to see how even
just in drawing circles, so many of these patterns remind me of things that
I've seen in nature. The concentric circles remind
me of the rings of a tree. The touching cycles
remind me of river rocks. It's very interesting
to see that play out. Yeah, I got a lot of inspiration from nature and seeing the natural world
and going for walks, which is also a great
place to look for shapes and an inspiration for
this type of drawing. It's one of the
things that I really recommend is just the
best thing to do if you have time to do it before you do some pattern drawing
to just go outside. I think it can be
surprising how it inspires you in
different ways and yes it's a great
source of inspiration. I absolutely agree. I think we spend so
much time indoors, that we forget that we are
really meant to be outside. Yes, absolutely. Definitely. All I'm
really doing is I'm just playing with the circle and thinking about how I could
use it in different ways. You don't have to be doing
exactly what I'm doing, you could be playing with
the circles in your own way or if you prefer to
be following what I'm doing, then feel free. It's really just to give us some starting
points that we're going to use in our circular passive drawing in the
third part of the class.
5. Working With Lines: I'm going to move on
to the lines part now. I wanted us to explore by
and lines today together. The reason I wanted us to
look at lines is because lines they can just be
used in so many ways. You can fill areas with them if you're creating a texture, you can outline shapes. You can lay them up and create a layered
pattern with them. There's so much that
you can do with them. When we draw a circular
pattern today, it's going to be
a bit like this. We can think of these, each layer of the circle, a bit like a row or a
layer of our pattern. What I'm going to do in my lines experimentation is
just do two parallel lines, which would represent a layer
of our circular drawing. Then think about how
lines could be used within that in different ways. For example, something
that I used an awful lot with my lines is just
simple parallel lines. I might do some
simple parallel lines with my first example. Then there'll be some really
easy variations of this, so you could do angled lines. Of course, depending on
what medium you're using, they could be
thicker or thinner, or closer together,
or further apart. I'm using a dual-ended pen today because I quite
like to go back in and sometimes shade areas. It could be that as
part of your pattern, you might end up
shading some areas. Lines they're so helpful because they can be such a great
connecting pattern to use in this type of
pattern drawing. We've got some angled lines, you could separate out. You could do some vertical lines and then some horizontal
lines inside. Another mindful drawing exercise that I want to talk to you about is that we can do
particularly helpful when we're drawing clusters of shapes like this is counting. Counting is, again, it's
another way that we can keep our brain
focused on our drawing. If you were to be drawing
clusters of lines, so for example maybe I'll
draw a set of three, that takes 1, 2, 3,
1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. Just counting them
although obviously, we might count naturally if we're doing a
pattern like that. If you intentionally counting
the shapes that you draw and this doesn't have
to just apply to lines. This could apply to any shapes that you're repeating
in your pattern. By counting it's another way
of just kicking our brain into trying to stay
present on this drawing. Because our hand is
doing something, it's drawing and then giving our brain an
additional task other than just thinking
about the drawing and actually needing to come. It just really helps us to
stay in the present moment. Some patterns will be really
a bit too much to try and count every
shape that you draw. If that's the case, you could count the
clusters of shapes. It could be that if you're
counting with this one, for example, it might be that you just count each column. Or if you'd like to
count quite a lot, you could count
every single line. It really is something that
I find really helps me. If I find I'm having a
particularly difficult time with, my mind is wandering
off all over the place. I start counting the
shapes that I'm drawing. I often find that
that just helps to bring me back
into the drawing. Listening to you
say this is making me realize very belatedly that counting shapes is just a mindfulness exercise. When you need a place. Absolutely, so I think
often mindfulness it's such a small thing, it's just such a small change and we do it in very small
parts all of the time without necessarily calling
it that or labeling it. I think you can do
anything mindfully. It's just reminding yourself
that's what you're doing and that's what you're trying to keep very present
in what you're doing. Now, that makes complete sense. They don't have to be just
straight lines as well. You could do curved lines, are really nice as well. Curved lines can give things a very three-dimensional feel. Another note on the
counting as well, if you are counting your shapes that you're drawing
and you lose count, don't stress out about it, don't try and start
recounting the shapes from where you
started drawing them, because it can become quite
stressful in that scenario. Just start again at one and just keep going
and just let it go. If you lose count and you
forget what you were, just don't worry about it, it's very easily done as well. You will end up losing count because it's just natural which is our brains just find
it hard I think to always focus on something. That reminds me of
the rules I started general meditation
practice where like if you have a thought that
comes up that distract you, you're supposed to
just let it go. I'm trying not to be judgmental about the fact that
it's happening because it's completely
normal and natural. I think sometimes we can
get very disappointed if we're trying to do
something mindfully and then our brains
are just about where it's just some basis, it's just like that and that's just the way that
we are working that day. I'm just having that sense of forgiveness of ourselves that we're not always
going to get it as it should be textbook. You can see with this last one, I started to use a line in a
way that's actually forming a shape rather than it being just a straight
line or a curved line. I've got a zigzag in there, which essentially is
a row of triangles. Again, I could add more
patterns into that, so I could add more
parallel lines. All we really have
worked with on this page from the shape library
is really simple. It's just a circle and a line, and then bringing some
other things into those and playing with them. But they are absolutely
endless possibilities with what you could do. You could go on
for days and days and days just drawing
patterns like this that are just
made of lines. There's just so many
different things that you can do with
one simple shape. It's really just
about finding the way that you like to
work with that shape and how it suits you. I hope that you're finding a helpful exercise to work with, but to do something a bit
more curved and looping. Now, it's one continuous line. I like working with scallops. Have a scalloped line in. It's just a very flowered shape. It's like looking rainbows, I think maybe that's
why I like them. Or they remind me of
flower petals and shells and all those things
that keep coming back into my pattern drawing.
6. Final Drawing Exercise: As we're going to start
our circular drawing next, I just wanted to show you
a couple of examples, because it may be that you have something in mind that
you're already drawing with, or it may be that
you are someone that has loads of art supplies
and you're like, "Well, I'm not sure
what I'm going to do." I'll show you a
couple of things. This is the simple black or any color painted on
white paper example. This is the sort of thing
that we'll start to do. It could be that you
want a super fine pen. Sometimes I like to
do really small ones. These are with a
really fine pen. It just depends on what mood
you're in or if you like, really, something much fatter. I generally work with a much
broader pen at the moment, but I did these ones
a few weeks ago. Something else that's quite
nice to work with if you have the option to
is colored paper. This is just yellow paper, which I've waxed with
a pink POSCA on top. This can give you a
really nice effect. The methods are
exactly the same, it's just about
whatever you have that you're working with. That's just a pink
pen on yellow paper. This one is same material. It's POSCA pens with
colored background again. There's just two
colors of pen there. It's just blue and yellow. But of course, with the
bright pink background, it just give you a
really vibrant effect. This big one, which you
would've seen the listing, this one took me a lot longer than we have
time for the class today. In this one, I probably
did this about three days. It probably took me
about three hours in total because I kept
coming back to it. This one is painting. It's acrylic paint with
POSCA pens on top. I painted the circles in, first and then came back
and drew over the top. Another thing that I really
like about this as a process is that you can just
come back to it. You create this frameworks
yourself and then it's almost like a coloring in process. You've got these things
that you're going to draw, so you can create this framework for yourself and then
you can come back. There's just a little one. This is just a blue pen
on regular white paper, but I've just cut this one
out as a hanging thing. I quite like to
create these little hanging drawings sometimes. I just wanted to show
you those few things before we begin the drawing, in case you're stuck there
with loads of materials thinking, what should I do? What am I going to use? I'm actually going to continue with the pen that
I have been using. I find that I'm just really comfortable in using that pen. I might add a bit of color
later if there's time. But it's important to
keep using whatever you are really happy
and comfortable with. But I just wanted
to show you those as a idea as to how you can actually extend this exercise with more time and
more materials. What we'll do, you'll need a fresh sheet of paper or a fresh sheet
in your sketchbook, and we're going to start with
some concentric circles. We've practiced this already. Find, roughly, the center. You don't need to be super
accurate about this, and actually you don't have
to do it in the center. you could do it
near the bottom of the paper or coming off
the corner if you want to. It's completely a suggestion
to start in the middle. We just start drawing
some concentric circles. Try it, if you can, to practice that exercise of just bringing your awareness and your attention to the point where you begin and
end each circle. Another tip, if you still find that your mind
wanders when you're doing some concentric circles, it can help sometimes
if you keep moving the point where you
start and end the circle. If you imagine a clock face, I've just started and
ended that one at 12:00, I could then start and
end the next one at 6:00. Just gives your
brain something else to have to think about. Then I'll stop this one at 9:00. Again at 3:00. You can see my circles
are very wonky, and this is something
that I've come to embrace and love
about this kind of drawing, is the wonkiness. If you're someone who
is really neat and finds this really
difficult, of course, if you'd find it
stressful drawing wonky circles,
then by all means, you could draw around
something circular if that would really help. But I do think that it's really a quite helpful thing
to encourage us to sit with the imperfection
and embrace it. You can keep drawing as many circles as you want
or you can just draw a few and then we can start introducing
our patterns to them. I'm just going to do that
many circles to start with, and now I'll start drawing some patterns inside those rows. That's why it's helpful
to have this page nearby so that we can take some inspiration from
some of those things. One thing that I would say is, when starting, I very often don't start with the
very middle circle. Sometimes I come
back to that and do something with it later, because at some times
you don't really know, exactly what you what you want
to have in the very center until you've got
some lines drawn in. I think I'll just start with
something quite simple. I'll just start with
some parallel lines, but because they're going in a tight circle I'll
treat it a bit like a clock face and do them spreading out from the
center like a bicycle wheel. As we draw in any
of our patterns, in our circular rows, if you can try to practice those line
for drawing techniques, try to focus on
closing the shapes. It doesn't have to be circles. I could be focusing
on making sure that the line touches both the
top and bottom of this row, and that would be exactly
the same as we've practiced with
closing the circles. It could also be that we are practicing the
counting as well. It may be that you want to count the shapes
that you're drawing. My next row, I think I'm going
to do some more circles, so I'll just draw them touching. The next thing I'm going
to do is the exact next exact line. I love that you have
that guideline there, all the other patterns
you did so that you can just look to it for inspiration
whenever you need it. Yeah, I think that's one of
the things that I find with any other types of drawing
when you're drawing something and especially if you're doing something
very representational, like you're drawing
a character or a place or anything like that. We often work with reference material because
it helps us to get started. But I think often with patterns, it's helpful to have that
reference material as well, but in a slightly different way because the great thing about patterns is they don't have
to look very certain way. We're not creating a
visual representation of something that
everybody understands. We're not making a
character or something that people will
look at and think, well, it doesn't look like it's supposed to look like that. I think it can be a
really nice thing to have just the shape library and just a few experiments with those different
shapes so that when you're drawing your patterns, you can really focus on it as a ready relaxing experience and a mindful drawing session rather than having
all those worries about what am I going to draw or what shape should I use
and where should I begin, and all those things that are natural to think
about when you are working with
withdrawing in any way, whether it's patterns
or something else. It takes away some
of those anxieties. Yeah. I do have a fairly comparable
question from someone which I think in some
ways you've just answered. Christy wants to
know whether you plan these out ahead and
pencil or just jump in. But I get the sense that the shape library building is the planning stage and
when you're in this stage, you're just trying to focus on creating each
step as it comes. Yeah, that's a really
good question. I draw them very
intuitively now. I do have the shape library, but I don't actually always feel
that I need to refer to it. But I think that's mostly
because I've been drawing patterns as a daily practice
now for several months. I suppose I probably got the shape library almost my
head but I think if it's something that you're just
beginning and then just using those references is a great way to support you getting started. I'm much more, I guess, focused on the process rather
than the outcome. All those examples
that I showed you, I don't think I planned
any of them actually. I find that, for me, it's about drawing in that
moment and I choose the shapes that I want to draw based on just what I feel like I
want to draw at that moment. That's part of the mindful
aspects of it is being able to tune in to how
you're feeling that day. For example, you can tell
that I was feeling very different on the day that
I drew those very fine, thin ones from the
day when I was doing the much
thicker, bolder ones. I think it's quite nice to
give yourself that freedom. Although a lot of them, they do end up looking
interesting visually. I think a lot of the
benefit of it is actually in the process
rather than the product, and actually how you feel
when you're drawing and any impact that doing the drawing actually
has on how you feel. If you feel
differently after you did it to how you start it. I very often find
that's the case for me. I often feel a lot
calmer and more centered after I've
been drawing a pattern. Sometimes if I don't
have a lot of time, I just do a really small amount of passing drawing almost
as like a warm-up, I'm going to be drawing
something else. It can just help just to get my mind in the right headspace
to be creative really. I think that's why
I think it can be a helpful exercise
to help you if you have a bit of creative block
or you're feeling a bit stuck to just have your
hand doing something. There's no pressure here. It doesn't have to
look a certain way. I think that that can be a really valuable
drawing practice. It's a very personal thing. It's not for anybody
else but you. I think that that
makes total sense. I do want to let you
know that we are at about 10:55 my time. About 3:55 over there for you. We can go a little over, but
I did want to see if you wanted to open things up
for questions as you work. Absolutely. Yeah. Please ask anything if anyone
has any questions. Fantastic. Folks, if you do
have any questions for now, go ahead and throw
them in the chat and I will pass them along. I suspect a lot of folks
like me are just feeling very calm and relaxed
after this lovely session. Yeah, hopefully it will last in drawing and that's the aim. Another thing that I thought I'd mentioned around this point is, if you've drawn in a few rows
of patterns, you can see, as I'm drawing them
in they're all looking very tonally,
quite similar. They have a similar value. Another thing that
you can start to do as you're drawing is there's some different ways that
you can add depth and interests, into your patterns. One is, as I'm doing now, I'm just using my pen
to shade in some areas. You can see that
that will start to just bring the pattern out a little bit so it doesn't feel like
it's getting lost. Another thing that you can do is start to add some color as well. If that's something
that interests you. You could almost start using
it like a coloring page and I'm using colors to introduce some depth
and interests as well. And of course, coloring has some amazing mindful
benefits as well. It's a very therapeutic
tool to use. It is very cool to see
how much contrast and interest that little bit of shading adds to
the whole piece. Yeah. It's very dramatic. This is why I said, maybe leave the center part
until you've done a few rows because you may want
to go back and like shade in because that will
also do the same thing. It will add a bit of
depth to the whole thing. Absolutely and almost
three-dimensional effect. Yet another reason why I quite like structuring my
patterns in this way, in this circular form.. It depends how much
time you have that. You could call this
finished after five rows or you
could continue for 50 rows and it still works. In terms of timing, if you were doing
something larger, like one of those larger pieces, it could be that if you
don't have a lot of time, but you just want to do
a little bit each day, you could just do one row per day and it'd be something
that you come back to each day and just do an extra part of
it, it's very adaptable. I think that's why I have found this passing drawing process so addictive and it's really become a daily
practice for me. I love that idea
of a row each day, just tracking how you're feeling in that moment every day for a few weeks with
such a cool concept. Yeah. Because you could choose a different color each day or
it could be something that represents how you feel or be interesting to look
back on a diary in pattern. Yeah, absolutely. I also have somebody in the chat who does
not have a question, but just wants to let you
know how validating and wonderful they found this class but I thought I'd
pass that along. Thank you so much. I'm
so glad to hear that. That's exactly what I
was hoping for because I think this is such
simple techniques. There's not really anything complicated about
this way of drawing. I think the benefits
are so huge. It's just such a really
nice thing to do. That's what I was hoping
that you might get from it. Well, it definitely seems
to have pass that along. I do think most of our students here are just absorbed their
their patterns, which is what you love to see. Yeah, definitely. If you feel happy to share them, I'd love to see any if
you've been working on something if you're feel
happy to share as well.
7. Final Thoughts: Thank you guys all for coming. I really appreciate
it and thank you for sharing your gorgeous
drawings with me as well. I hope that this is
something that you feel that you can take into your life and use it as a really
helpful tool for mindfulness, whenever you feel you need it.
Mel Rye, ✎ Artist + Educator
