Draw and Be Happy

Art Exercises to Bring You Joy

Tim Shaw

• Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781452172699

Drawing makes you happy! This boldly illustrated handbook offers easy-to-follow drawing exercises—some thought-provoking, some meditative, all fun—inspired by art-therapy practices. Each page features an activity written by artist and activist Tim Shaw and brought to life with colorful art from Spanish illustration duo Cachetejack, offering readers simple strategies for boosting their confidence, reducing stress, and expressing themselves in meaningful and joyful new ways. With a distinctive, modern aesthetic, Draw & Be Happy will resonate with both new and experienced artists looking for fulfillment through creativity.

ENJOY THE JOURNEY

The next time you are a passenger on a long journey, keep yourself energized by using your time to document all that is going on outside of the window.

Keep a separate sketchbook to take with you on all your journeys, whether you travel by car, train, plane, or bus. That way, rather than falling asleep or staring blankly at the road markings zooming by, you can use your travel time as an opportunity to hone your quick-sketching skills.

Don’t worry about making a recognizable composition; instead try to capture as much as you possibly can from what you see out of the window. Make a series of speedy marks and lines that represent every tree, intersection, street sign, traffic light, and animal that passes. You may not have time to arrange the positioning of each addition to your drawing, so enjoy the free and abstract aesthetic of the resulting artwork. By the time you finish a journey and a drawing, there may well be some discernible observations on the paper, but overall you should have an energetic mass of lines and strokes that act as a diary entry for the trip.

Log your trips

Make a single drawing on one side of a sheet for each journey, and when you have finished, note down the origin and destination on the reverse of the drawing. The sketchbook will soon fill up and become a visual log of your journeys, and might stop you reverting to your inner child by repeatedly asking, “Are we there yet?”

SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE

It’s not only clouds up there. Make a drawing of everything happening above your head, taking down on paper the tops of buildings and trees, flocks of birds, and the movement of planes and vapor trails.

Spending time looking up and recording what you see might seem like a luxury—when we are outside, we tend to spend most of our time rushing around, trying to get to our destinations—but there is an abundance of visual stimulation to enjoy when looking up at the sky. And of course you can always tell yourself that drawing outside is a good way of getting some vitamin D.

Vary the pressure

If you have one, use a soft pencil to replicate the delicate edges and shadows of the clouds and the gradation of tone in the sky. Change the direction and level of pressure that you apply with the tip and the edge of the graphite, and use your finger or an eraser to blend and smooth the shadows.

Use a firmer pressure on the pencil as well as different gestures and marks to add the networks of condensation trails left by aircraft, for example, or the dark silhouettes of birds flying by.

Frame the drawing with confident lines and scratches to represent the branches of trees, lampposts, and the tops of buildings. This is similar to how you might give depth to a landscape drawing by building up the background, middle ground, and foreground.

You can try making the image as a circular polyorama by arranging all of the visual events you want to get down on paper around a central point, in a style akin to a photomontage or collage.

CAPTURE THE SUN

Enjoy time in the sun while making a drawing that is only revealed after some help from its rays.

First, do not look directly at the sun! This may sound obvious, but it is worth saying. Instead use the sun to make a drawing in the form of a cyanotype, also known as a photogram. For this, you will need to buy a cyanotype kit. Make a silhouette on some photographic paper by covering areas of the paper with objects or a drawing on acetate, and then expose the paper to the sun. Run water over the paper and watch the image develop as it dries. You will be left with an image made with the help of ultraviolet light from the sun.

A DANCE ON PAPER

Imagine that all the people moving through a busy, lively environment are dancers in a production that you are choreographing. Let your pen follow the way each person moves as you record their actions on paper.

Everyone has their own set of movements and individual traits, which you can try to capture with a unique set of marks. Next time you are sitting down for a coffee in a café, waiting for a train, in the queue at the grocery store, or having lunch in the park, take a look at all the people moving within and passing through the space around you. Someone may be making small movements with their arms as they read a magazine, another might be striding purposefully toward a destination, and another may be tapping their foot impatiently at a counter.

Use your pen to follow the way each person moves and map their trajectory within the space. You can do this exercise for a minute or you can keep working on the one sheet of paper in one location for several hours.

Different strokes

Use a different mark to represent each person. Assign individual dancers a color or drawing implement (from pencil, to pen, to charcoal, to eyeliner, to highlighter). It might be easiest and most effective to focus solely on individuals’ movements rather than on the paper and the composition of your drawing. You should end up with a set of choreographer’s marks, or perhaps something that resembles a musical score, based on the way a group of individuals have interacted in this one space at one time. The chances are, your dancers will not even have realized their part in the production that you have just transcribed.

CHALLENGES MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD

Remember those mazes that would come on a paper placemat when you went for pizza as a child? Try designing your own, but make it as complicated and as nearly impossible to crack as you can. Invent as many spirals, wrong turns, and dead ends as you can fit on the page, and then test the cleverest person you know to complete the challenge.

To create your own maze, you will need a sheet of paper and a black pen. Remember that the bigger the sheet of paper that you work on, the more complex the maze you can create. Start from the final destination point of the maze, which can be in the center of the paper, or anywhere on the sheet that you wish, and draw a celebratory symbol within a box to signify the completion of a difficult journey. Work your way outward from the end point with your pen. Create as many dead ends and wrong turns as you can fit on the page and make the players double-back on themselves, go round in circles, and get lost.

The pathway you are designing doesn’t necessarily have to go in straight lines with ...