(CDMX, México)

Sofia taught two workshops focusing on observation as a basis of practice for drawing and play as an ideal state to best stimulate relaxation, intuition and improvisation.

At Imiari, students worked individually, seeking immersion in the creative process, concentration and deep observation, through the exploration of the environment, observation and imagination.

Drawing Rally

“Become an intrepid explorer, sharpening your drawing and observation powers in a graphic recollection game”

Activity:

Fragment collectors: Strategies for Creation. The children wrote down the following clues, and dedicated themselves to finding them and registering them in drawings.

 

Clues: 

Find an object that came from the other side

Find an object that is from here

Find something that could be inside or outside the body

Find an unlikely encounter between two different things

Find a circle (ellipse) interrupted by something else

Find a plant dancing

Find a timestamp

Find something to repeat

Find something broken

Find something fixed

Find something crawling

Find something to jump

Find something forgotten

Find something that scary

Find something that could not be anywhere else

Find something eating something else

 

Discussion:

How do we understand objects as processes?

How do we understand our scale as one within many simultaneous ones?

Participants: 10

In the Technical High School, students asked to bring familiar items from home. It worked collectively and collaboratively and individually.

First, a still-life installation was built and chairs were placed around the construction. We sought to vary scales, textures, shapes, positive and negative spaces.

The students began with a series of drawings made through a blind contour technique.  It is a drawing without looking down at the paper; used to combat the idea that “I don’t know how to draw”.

A series of exercises began under the following instructions:

First drawing: choose an area of ​​the installation. Draw them in such a way that they touch the edges of the paper, filling the entire page.

Second drawing: from your first drawing, zoom out until your focus opens wide enough to cover six or more objects. Draw half of them from the observation, leaving ‘ghosts’ silhouettes of the other objects

Third drawing: using the two previous techniques, compose a free drawing, drawing things out of proportion and leaving ghosts (editing, omitting areas of the installation).

Finally, the students collaboratively created drawings playing the exquisite corpse: choose a fixed point of the installation to start drawing. When the workshop says, pass your drawing to your partner on the left side. At the end of the full round and when their own drawing returned to their hand, the students managed to observe the changes due to points of view, position, differences in line quality and especially individual criteria and making decisions about the pictorial picture. Participants: 25

At La CasaClu, we worked with children of various ages, the main objective was to stimulate the imagination in a fun way. Address the notion of fear and the possibility of dissipating it with humor and fun.

Monster games

Each participant says a characteristic of the monster (physical and intangible – eg four, tails, fear of the dark …). From 4 to 6 characteristics – each one draws the monster. Color was used. The children each drew their own monsters and also collective monsters: each one drew a part of the drawing, without being able to see the rest of the paper, deforming scale and continuity and making the drawings much funnier. Participants: 15