Starting a New Year with GUT with Wendy MacNaughton

Bay Area artist and illustrator, Wendy MacNaughton, mixes drawing, social work and storytelling into rich and fun exercises for children, through her 'Drawing Together' program, and for adults, through the Grown-ups Table (aka GUT) program. She is a visual columnist for the New York Times and the California Sunday Magazine.

To start 2024, Wendy has put together a daily lesson with prompt for each day of January for the GUT group (made up of many hundred to even possibly 1,000+ adult members). Each lesson has a bit of narrative followed by an exercise to take a suggested 10 minutes. Her intention -- to help members build an ongoing practice and deliver basic drawing knowledge.

For this month, I broke out an older sketchbook with a lot of blank pages of which many have been filled since January 1st. I was especially tickled with a recent blind contour drawing (looking only at a source image while moving my pen over the paper in conjunction with my eyes moving around the source image). There is actually an 'essence' of the source photo in the sketch that took about 4 minutes.

I've learned a lot about how people interpret instructions, look and see, have deeply-held stories about subjects you would never guess, and draw in different ways (whimsically, seriously, tentatively, etc.). We, as members, have the opportunity to share our work with others in Wendy's private Substack chat as well.

For more information about Wendy and/or her groups, visit her website at the link below.

Wendy MacNaughton's website

Comments

Introducing 'Kaleidoclown'

For fun, I've drawn one of my own photos (yes, I was dressed in a clown outfit) and added a wild and crazy background to accompany it for today's practice effort. As part of sketching the piece, it was split into four sections with two opposing diagonal lines. In terms of color choices, I've worked with color gradations for some shape sections. Can you believe, there are five major shapes in this effort? There really are -- circles, squares, trapezoids, triangles and spirals. I think the substrate is Biengfang Watercolor Paper (140 lb.). The materials used were Ohuhu markers, Micron 01 pigment ink pen, some red Stickles glitter glue for the nose, and a white Posca pen (for white dots on the face and to highlight eyes) and a yellow one (for yellow dots in the center of the flowers on the hat). There was no intention in working on this piece other than to have fun...and based on how it looks, I'd say well done!. One thing I learned is that blending with the Ohuhus i

New Project in Progress

I'm working on a new project with multiple layers and shapes of different colored organzas. It is an interpretation of lighting on an ice rink...from a show I recently saw. There is a lot more stitching to do, but I like how its coming along. I'm learning organzas are not easy to work with especially when you layer them and have overlaid edges. The fabric also tends to ravel easily. This post also linked to http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com .

A New Sharpie Drawing/Painting

This effort was done starting with a 5-minute sketch while process photos were taken along the way. My intention was to work on color selections and to complete the jewelry/dangles to stand out without overtaking the female image (and maybe even getting a sense of dimension with their use). This is the second project in which a straight line across the page has been added to interrupt the wavy/curved lines -- and to show that using subtle color adjustments on each side of the line. (The first project that incorporates a line can be seen in the August 23rd post,) I'm pleased with how this came out. There are a few areas where the decoration looks sparse, but I notice it seems restful to my eye, since the balance of the Sharpie-painted areas are much busier. What is your experience looking at it? What draws your attention first?

Cay Denise

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