Do you spend time playing with art materials?
I should. But I haven’t been.
The idea of playing freaks me out - art materials are expensive! I can’t waste them with messing about for goodness sake!
I forgot that playing helps with finding new ways to do things and those new discoveries can be really useful when it comes to working on something properly.
Luckily for me, I’ve been taking a comics class with Jane Porter over the last 10 weeks. It’s made me play and push things further and quicker than if I had carried on cautiously trying things out in a more serious way.
A lot of my experiments are fairly unreadable to someone else but there were so many sparks in my brain as I made them. So many exciting tiny moments that I could take forward into my work.
I had fun playing with: mono printing textures, big bold collages, illustrating smells and rediscovering how much I love ink and wax crayon together. And we made stories from tiny things in our everyday lives.
The class is aimed at all levels and so welcoming. Thanks to the zine swap towards the end of term I now have a stack of lovely zines made by my classmates - what an absolute treat!
Dedicated time during the class to work on fun prompts and the friendly atmosphere made me take a much lighter approach to making images.
And now I’ve finally remembered that drawing is just paper and pencil and it really doesn’t matter I’m excited to do lots more playing! (might even throw a bit more colour in!)
How do you keep lightness and play in your art making? Any and all tips you have would be so interesting to hear, let’s share!
Ps. here’s the zine I made for our end of term zine swap:
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Love this! What a great framework to experiment with play and materials! I'm trying hard to lean into play, but I often get stuck on 'what' to draw, of what marks to start with. I think I need a brief for playing - haha - but a zine with simple prompts is a brilliant way to do that!
I spend a lot of time playing with colours and materials in my sketchbook. Once in a while I feel a bit guilty because I’m suddenly aware I’m using something expensive but I quickly remind myself that I need to practice with them otherwise how will I be able to use them on a real piece?☺️