Welcome to the winter edition of a quarterly, seasonal drawing challenge, created to tune into the seasons, through creativity and time in nature.
I don’t know about you, but for me the run up to the festive season, the lack of daylight, and the general extra (but very beautiful) life things - like extra family time, more social events - and work deadlines can leave me feeling a little topsy turvy!
It can be so easy to slip out of a creative practice and self care habits in this period. Sometimes, this is just what we need - a break! Even hobbies and self care can feel like too much - If this is you, please take the rest and recharge those batteries. Drawing and painting shouldn’t feel like another thing on your to-do list, and there’s no shame in doing less!
However, if you are looking to keep up an easy and quick habit through this somewhat chaotic period, I’ve designed our winter drawing challenge to help.
It’s quite simply seven prompts you can follow when you’re out on a walk. It’s all about fun, play and a little nonsense. You can do these walking around the block, in a garden, in a park, up a hill - whatever level of adventure you’re going for, the main thing is that it’s looking at or being outside.
There’s not much better than drawing with friends, so if you can grab a buddy to do this with remotely or in person, send them this blog post and go for a stomp & draw together ☀️
The Focus:
We can be tight on time in the winter months, so I’ve made the point of these exercises to be all about SPEED! Drawing quickly is one of my favourite ways to loosen up, and in these chillier months, we don’t want to be sitting outside for long periods of time.
In our autumn drawing challenge, I focused on looking closely and zooming in on nature, and provided suggestions of things to draw. This time around, the prompts are more about ways of drawing draw, than what to draw.
It might be lovely to pick the same subject (thing/place) to draw every time, across each of the exercises, and see how the results vary! If you do a daily or weekly walk, pick a spot, scene, plant or leaf to be your subject for this drawing challenge.
There’s no deadline for this, and you can do the prompts once, or repeat them across the winter season. I’ve made this challenge with the idea to do one prompt per walk. If you have more time, of course feel free to try out multiples on your walk.
The Materials:
Time for a walk (20 mins should do the trick!)
A small sketchbook - I like A6 as it fits in my pocket. Don’t have one? Check out my tutorial on how to create one from a piece of paper here.
Pocket sized materials that fit in a small tupperware/ glasses case / container. Check out this post for my lightweight low-tech outdoor drawing materials kit list. Some materials I love for working outside are soft pastels, oil pastels, pencils and watercolours.
The Aims:
To draw quickly and loosely: each exercise can be done in under 5 minutes
To not worry about what our drawing looks like - let’s aim for silly drawings. This is about practice and doing over beautiful masterpieces
To play with combining two or more mediums
To get some time outside
The Prompts:
These exercises are the core warm up exercises I use in my practice, to paint loosely and freely. Chances are you’ve done them before - they’re classics for a reason! Feel free to adapt and combine them as you see fit. Play around with the timings of each of these exercises - 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute and so on. How does time change your drawing? Make sure to note down how long you spent on it, and what prompt you used, for future reference.
Drawing without looking at the page
Looking at the focus for X seconds, and then drawing - only looking at the page, drawing from memory - for X seconds.
Looking at the focus for X seconds, then drawing with your eyes closed for X seconds.
Looking where and however you want, but drawing with your least dominant hand
Drawing and looking at the focus and page as you see fit, but keeping the medium on the page until you’re done (a continuous line drawing) - play with pressure (changing how hard or light you push dight your medium on the page) to get some beautiful line variation
Drawing for X seconds or minutes, firstly by moving your drawing hand very slowly.
6.5 Let’s call this one 6.5, as it’s a variation of exercise 6: we’re going to draw for X seconds or minutes; this time moving our hand as fast as we can.Drawing the negative space: Drawing as a continuous line, everything around the point of our focus. If our subject is a leaf, we are going to draw/scribble/colour continuously everything around our leaf. This might result as a block colour of negative space, or you might be including detail of the surroundings - it’s up to you!
Sharing with others:
I’ll be documenting my results over on my instagram account at @orlastevens, and will share a follow up blog post on how I’ve found it, along with images of all my final drawings, so stay tuned for the next blog instalment. If you’d find it helpful to see visual demonstrations, I’ve documented my interpretation to each of these prompts over on my youtube.
If you’d like to share the work you make on this challenge with other people in The Outdoor Sketchbook Collective, let’s use the hashtag #outdoorsketchbookcollective on Instagram - (please tag me so I can find your lovely posts easily!) I’ve shared a list of the prompts on my instagram, which you can save for easy access & reference when you’re out and about sketching.
Learn More
If you’ve enjoyed this challenge and would like to dive deeper with your learning, consider checking out my Patreon - also called The Outdoor Sketchbook Collective. This is an online learning space with tutorials, prompts, a community chat and monthly zoom meet up for people interested in all things landscape, nature, abstraction, self expression and drawing with more freedom and play!
If you enjoy my blog and would like to help support the creation of this free content for others, liking and sharing with friends really helps, and if you’re able, consider contributing the price of a coffee to my tips jar here.
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