Good morning, friends, and welcome to your first Do It at Home Index Card Drawing!
This is required work for all members of the Mental Asylum for Corrupted Children (MACC), and optional fun for parents, siblings, or any former students trolling this blog – if any of you feel like you might benefit from taking an extended moment to focus your mind and channel your creative impulse, please join in (and email me a photo of the final product!).
This is bound to feel a little strange at first, but I am confident that we’ll all find a rhythm with this – and who knows, you may even grow to love doing this within the comfort and (relative) privacy of your own home.
My advice: use this activity as we do in class – to focus and calm our minds and prepare ourselves for our work day. Try not to do this and then just go back to playing Minecraft; instead, use it as your external and internal cue to begin your at-home school schedule, in a certain frame of mind.
Read this entire entry before you begin, but try to not think about what you are going to draw before you start – like in class, try to read the prompt, start the music, and begin drawing, following your first impulse and doing your best to silence The Two Questions.
Steps:
1. Find a place where you can focus and where you will not be interrupted.
2. Clear off your work space – we create space on our desk (or whatever) so that we can create space in our minds.
3. Prepare your materials: comp book, pencil, bravery.
4. Draw an index card-sized frame in your comp book (unless you, incredibly, have a secret stash of index cards…) (Hey! I want those back, klepto!). Try to resist the impulse to use a ruler. Your choice as to landscape or portrait.
5. Picture someone around the same age as you, with the same hopes and fears and challenges, in this present moment in time, somewhere in the world. What message would you like to send to them?
Draw you, Ivan Brunetti-style, sending that message to them, Ivan Brunetti-style. How you communicate with them is entirely up to you – it could be literal or abstract.
Rules:
- Faces visible.
- Whole bodies.
- Be brave.
- Keep your pencil in motion until the song ends (7 minutes), then stop.
Press “play” to hear this so-good-it-will-blow-your-mind song by Stevie Wonder.
Put the date on the outside of the frame, take a clear picture, and email it to me. Resist the impulse to perfect (used as a verb) the image before you send it; it is perfect (used as an adjective) just the way it is. You are not being judged on your artistic abilities, only on your willingness to fully engage in this activity.
(You won’t be sending me every index card – only sometimes.)
Now go look up Stevie Wonder. See you in the class meeting!
PS: all credit goes to the one and only Lynda Barry for creating this Morning Index Card Drawing structure.
The results (you can hover over an image to pause the slideshow):
