Tag: art prompt

Sketchbooks and visual journals, The Ancients

Art prompt: Back to beginnings

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Coloured pencil and ink go well together, especially in sepia. I decided to test them out in a sketchbook by sketching some artefacts – things that got me started in archaeology and human prehistory that still inspire me. The UNESCO World Heritage site of Catalhoyuk was a game changer for me when I first read about it in the 1990s. The site was discovered in 1958 and was excavated between 1961 and 1965. Those summer seasons of digging revealed a lot about ancient Anatolia that wasn’t previously known. Unfortunately excavations were halted until 1993 due to controversy. In 1993 archaeological excavations reopened and continued to 2018. While it is not the oldest Neolithic site, its excellent state of preservation and long occupation period has facilitated a better understanding of the transition to settled life and how people occupied the spaces within.

The site of Catalhoyuk is a settlement in Anatolia, Turkey. It’s almost continuous occupation spanned a period of almost two thousand years, making it one of the most important and abundant early settlements in human history.

Stepping much further back in time I decided to sketch some of the earliest evidence of stone tool-use. It’s a good way to refresh the memory and practice ink and pencil sketching techniques. I quite like the old school look the sepia colours imbue.

  • Pre-Oldowan and Oldowan stone tools
  • Acheulean stone tools
  • Mousterian and Levallois
  • Chatelperronian and Uluzzian
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Untold stories

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Sometimes I need to paint something that doesn’t require much investment of time or effort. I do this to avoid the habit of fussing with a painting, if I want to practice techniques or I’m working out a scene for a specific project. A good way I’ve found is to do postcard sized paintings of imaginary places. These are places with untold stories, which I used as an art prompt to create the three paintings below. It turns out it’s a lot of fun and they’re great for exercising creativity, especially if I’m feeling stuck or lazy. If it doesn’t work it’s not really a big deal because I’ve used minimal paper and paint. The only rule is to avoid spending too much time on each piece. I succeeded with the first two paintings, but ended up spending too much time fussing with the third, which is also larger than a postcard. Still, it was fun and I can see I still need to practice loosening up.

Art prompt: Untold stories

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Feeding the magpies and an art prompt

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In Australia, if we want to avoid being swooped by mobs of magpies in breeding season, we make friends with them. One way to do this is to feed them. While I don’t think they actually see us as friends, they do remember humans who are kind to them. As such no one in my house has been swooped by magpies, not even my dogs. And this seems to extend for quite a large area around my house.

Not everyone agrees that feeding them is a good idea, as there is a concern it could change their natural behaviour, make them dependent on humans, or risk their health with inappropriate food. Personally, I think the ship has sailed for the “natural behaviour” argument. Humans have so changed natural habitats that it would be naive to expect their behaviour won’t change too. As for their diet isse, we don’t feed them anything they wouldn’t normally forage for themselves and they still spend 90% of their time foraging naturally. Magpies know how to be magpies after all.

Magpies are successful in Australia precisely because of their ability to form cooperative relationships and to adapt to new situations. They’ve weathered some hard times and will again. Being such clever birds, I don’t think Maggie’s are in any danger of losing their ability to forage any time soon. Since Magpies live in the same territory for their whole lives, some of the birds that visit my home have been here at least long as I have (14 years) and see me as part as their landscape. They’ve seen the same shrinking of habitats and increase in the number of humans, cats and dogs and road traffic as I have during the past decade especially. But they didn’t complain. They changed their behaviour and they are resilient. I’m happy to be a magpie enabler.

So in honour of maggie’s, today’s prompt is resilience. Here’s my entry:

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Art prompt: herbs

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For today’s art prompt I chose basil and garlic. They both lend themselves nicely to stippling in pen and ink, a favourite technique and medium, plus I wanted to try something new (new to me anyway) and felt two illustrations would be better than one. Stippling is time consuming and requires a lot of patience, but it can also be meditative and rewarding to see the image come to life. I like the meticulousness of stippling, but I didn’t want to spend days making thousands of little specks; so with the pieces below I decided to go light on the stippling and add some colour with watercolour to see if it would work. I found that by laying down the stippling first it acted as a restraint to stop me overworking the darker tones in watercolour. I quite like the resulting illustrations and, in fact, these took less time using the two mediums than I would normally spend on just stippling in ink or painting in watercolour.

  • Basil leaves
  • Garlic bulbs

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Sketchbook habits: prompts

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When I start a sketchbook I make a contract with myself and I try to stick to these three Cs:

  • creativity – creativity begets creativity. Sketchbook often;
  • commitment – keep doing it often. Even if it’s not as pretty as you’d like, don’t give up;
  • carry on – Fill the sketchbook, stow it away somewhere safe and grab a new book or piece of paper.

But sometimes inspiration is lacking and it becomes an excuse to get lazy. So to keep myself accountable to a sketchbook habit I’m going to post daily prompts and share my journey. I hope some of these prompts inspire you too.

Today’s prompt is spiral

I chose to do a fossil ammonite:

Ammonite in pen and ink
© S M Egan