I recently purchased Carla Sonheim's book Drawing and Painting Imaginary Animals. I am fascinated by Carla's creative process for drawing her animals - finding inspiration in sidewalk cracks, oil blots on the pavement, the bark of a tree. I took my camera out on a walk with me the other day and started photographing asphalt cracks that I have likely walked by and over hundreds of times over the past few years. Now that I am reading her book, I saw these cracks in totally different ways! Right before my eyes were fantastical horses and mysterious birds! I saw outlines of mystical frogs and magical cats! What was once ordinary had become extraordinary! This mindset came with me as I began to brush together fallen blooms from my Christmas cactus plant. Once I had the fallen flowers and pollen in a pile and I was about to scoop them up to compost them, all of a sudden I noticed a beautiful winged creature - a bird of pink and orange with diaphanous wings! I grabbed my camera and snapped a photo before escorting this lovely bird to the compost bin :) I know that it will inspire a drawing or a mixed media piece! Where can you find the extraordinary in the ordinary????
1 comment:
That colorful mess is a lovely bird. I like looking out my bedroom windows on the mornings I get to sleep in and finding animals or faces in the branches and twigs of the trees outside my windows. And finding shapes in clouds is fun but so fleeting. Usually by the time I get my camera it's morphed into something else.
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