It’s been a good while since I lasted posted something from my creative practice. Of late, this has got lost in work and writing the thesis, and most of the creative practice happens in online drawing communities lately (‘Drawing with Dylan’ on Tuesdays from 6:30-7:30, ‘Pencils 4 Tea’s on Thursdays from 6 to 7pm, with occasional sessions with Sketch Appeal and the Sketchy Bitches (5-7pm on Sundays). This affirms that it is much easier to create in groups with regular sessions and social support.

Moving ahead, I’m planning to test ideas in my sketchbooks here and post my impressions on Fridays whatever happens (even if very little). It would be good to get back into the habit of posting.

This week, I experimented with the activity ‘Creating Characters’ in two parts. I usually use this exercise in group workshops, and in brief, it goes like this,

A) Group competition: which team can doodle as many faces as possible in 3 minutes?

B) In duos, choose a character that resonates, then redraw the character in a single panel cartoon. Discuss the character – what are they like? What do they do? What do they like? After the discussion, add speech and thought balloons. Here, you can use the humour device, ‘Thinking versus Saying,’ where characters ideas can contrast in interesting and funny ways.

I often use this activity to begin workshops with groups, as they have the support of the group to create lots of faces very quickly, and they have the support of building imaginatively from a previous drawing. It is too much to ask beginners to create a character from their imaginations without this incremental support.

This week, I tested the activity to see if it would work as a solo task too, with the thought that it might be useful in my graphic guidebook of the future.

Here is my Part A of my doodling as many faces as I could in 3 minutes. I quite enjoyed this, as relaxing and tried different shapes for heads and facial features, as below,

(Note, I coloured this page later while on the phone – I don’t like talking on the phone, so this is helpful and fun way to enjoy phone conversations). 

 It was interesting for me to notice that some familiar characters appeared, including; family members such as John, my Mum and my brother (twice), and also two fictional characters that I had invented previously – a ‘Mardy Bum’ which turned up in drawings one day when I was a bit moody (the character with hairy feet), and ‘Professor Wabi-Sabi Poopyhead’ (with the teal and pink hair). These spontaneous arrivals of characters are unlikely to happen in beginners’ groups, as they do not have characters to draw upon yet.

In a brief aside, I invented Professor Wabi-Sabi as a persona to help me cope better with teaching – she’s a free relaxed character who is ‘perfectly imperfect’ (the meaning of the Japanese words ‘wabi-sabi’) and is light-hearted and open.  Her hair signifies her alternative subversion and that she is multi-faceted with Bouba-Kiki hair (after Uznadze’s experiment). She is designed to counter my conscientious approach to teaching, which generally wears me out in the face of frequently absent, late, and chattily distracted students. I take it all too seriously, hence the ‘Poopyhead’ to embrace the silliness of it all. The irony of being too serious about Graphic Humour does not escape me…

I’m not sure Professor Wabi-Sabi is working as an antidote to caring too much about work, as I have decades of teaching habits to unravel. I still don’t sleep well before teaching, and I still get cross when students are late and miss the creative tasks. Last week, two students were 40 minutes late for the start of the class, then 10 minutes late after the break – they interrupted everyone twice, so I had a quiet chat with them outside class. This did not work, it just meant that they didn’t turn up at all for the final hour at all. It is tricky to ask students to improve their behaviour in an educational system where they are the customer and leave reviews on your courses. Sadly, it is likely that these students will now attend even more irregularly, and they will probably provide a negative module evaluation.

Back to the creative experimentation of Part 2, this was easy and enjoyable and rather than just building one single panel, I sketched up three panels in a relaxed way using adding words when inclined,

In the second example, I’m playing around with a memory of politician Norman Tebbit’s having bushy eyebrows in the 1980s. This is misremembered, it was Denis Healey. In any case, it is a humorous reference that, even if accurate, few would have understood (making a case for working with present day cultural references if you want to amuse others).

In this last example, it was fun to see my husband show up in Part A – especially as I struggle to draw him well and he appeared unusually easily in the initial doodle, but not so easily in this  final panel,

In summary, this activity also seems useful for both class and solo work. In addition, it would be possible to continue to develop ideas from the original doodles by getting students/creators developing conversations between several characters in panels and/or comic strips. Finally, it is perhaps interesting to notice the autobiographical elements that make their way into all creativity.