In a direct steal from the “Excuse me, may I blow your mind?” Professor of Amazingness, Lynda Barry (responsible for about 90% of my teaching practice) (okay 95%), we start each morning with a timed Index Card Drawing. Sometimes these are copying from an image; sometimes they are a free-style interpretation of a prompt; always, they help bring us to a common sense of focus and develop our image-attracting skills, while giving us daily practice in silencing The Two Questions (“Is it good?” Does it suck?”) by favoring doing over thinking. We also get to listen to funky music!
Here’s a selection of Index Card Drawings done during this time of emergency distance learning – in each instance you’ll see the prompt, the music the index card was drawn to, and then the results:
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, telling your The Black Cauldron partner(s), also drawn in Ivan Brunetti-style, something you appreciate about them (for reals).
What are you willing to wait for?
So many people misread the instructions for this one, but I love the misinterpreted drawings so much that I can’t help posting them here, too:
What is one possible way that our society or our way of being might be changed for the better by this present experience?
JONI-FEST!
What is your experience of Time?
Draw yourself, Ivan Brunetti-style, as a waitress in a diner.
Choose a Joni Mitchell painting that calls to you. Copy that image with as much precision and detail as you can.
Choose your music:
or
Who are you looking forward to seeing in person after physical-distancing restrictions are lifted?
Your job is to listen to the title track from Joni’s ground-breaking 1976 album Hejira and to draw what you hear.
In the spirit of R. Crumb’s famous “Meatball” series in Zap, draw three panels:
First panel: a person doing something.
Second panel: a meatball falling from the sky and hitting that person on the head.
Third panel: that person having a life-changing revelation.
Draw you, having an encounter with a visitor from another planet.
What do you consider one of your worst traits? Imagine that trait is now your superpower. Draw you as a superhero using this power as a force for good.
Choose two of the seniors from the Hornell High class of 1987 yearbook (“The Best of Times…”). Copy their grad photos. Go through your Daily Diaries and choose two of your Unexpected Things Heard to give them dialogue.
What could you do with fish heads?
Draw you in the dream world.
Draw you playing it cool.
Who is a friend from your childhood whom you have lost touch with? Draw that person as they exist in your memory.
Draw an image that has stayed with you from Richard Wagamese’s One Native Life.
To what or to whom will you always be true?
Draw you in a Broadway musical.
Copy one of these covers from the Black History Altered Book projects completed by past MACC students.
Draw an image that has lingered with you from any book you are reading right now or recently finished.
Make a collage of words and images that have stayed with you from the first week of June.
The Triumphant Return of JONI-FEST!
What brings you instant bliss?
Draw you at the worst party ever.
What makes you mad?
Copy a Joni Mitchell painting, remembering Lynda Barry’s incredible advice about images being like maps.
Draw what you hear while you listen to “Amelia.”
Copy this photograph of Richard Wagamese with as much precision and detail as you can muster – keeping in mind Lynda Barry’s incredible advice about images being like maps: a collection of lines with spatial relationships – while you listen to the music he said changed his life: Rostropovich playing the Dvořák Cello Concerto.
Put your heart into it.
Think back to the NewsHour segment we watched about Gen-Z.
If you were in charge, what changes would Gen-Z make to the world to make it a better, more fair, just, safe, and beautiful place to live? For reals.
You know those summer days that are really hot and the sky is cloudless and blue, and all the sprinklers are out, and all your friends are either busy or away, and the day seems to stretch on forever and you’re super bored but as soon it’s over you want another one just like it? Draw that.
Listen to historian Jill Lepore talk about the end of the polio epidemic, then, while you listen to Dolly Parton sing about the “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” draw you receiving the news that the COVID-19 vaccine works.
What is one of your favorite memories from this school year?
