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

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