2026 Momentum - A follow-on class to Find Your Joy (by Louise Fletcher)

After completing Find Your Joy (FYJ) in December 2025, I signed up for Momentum, a follow-on to FYJ that lasts six months.  It is intended as a springboard for students to identify and navigate our own creative path (clarifying our preferences, likes, etc.); areas of interest/focus for doing our work; practicing a system for exploring new ideas, benching ways of working that don't work or yield successful results, or have worn out their welcome; and, working through blocks, negative thinking, and the things we may have repressed that can surface during the creative process.

So far, students have had exercises to draw our chosen subject, explore constraints, and to simply play.  My chosen subject was tree bark (initially Redwood), but the Redwood bark is too dense, layered and fibrous to draw easily.  So, I drew the rings of a Redwood tree stump that includes the bark edging.  

The image (above left) was created  by doing a blind contour in white pen first (blind contour is looking at a reference photo but not the paper being drawn on).  The next step was using the same paper but a different pen (turquoise) while looking at the photo and the drawing when working.  In this photo, the turquoise outline dominates.  Even when the image is converted to monochrome, the turquoise becomes grey and still overpowers the white.

Next were exercises choosing constraints; I chose three.  The source photo used is included with the results below.  My limitations were:

1.  Make only 20 marks.  This was done with alternating orange markers (left side).

2.  Use only three colors and apply the paints with a flat bamboo stick (middle).

3.  Use only 6 continuous lines/marks that don't have to be straight (right side).  Three black pens of varying nib widths were used.

My play efforts have no theme.  The first day, I did a photo weave with two photos (one of a yellow flower and the other of patterned mushrooms).

My latest exploration was in mirror-writing, like Leonardo da Vinci was known to do.  Being a lefty (like he was), it's not as difficult as one might imagine once you get started--that is if you're left-handed.  That said, I used a mirror-written message on tissue paper as the background for this collage. I really like it, and there is a 'soft' feeling to it.  Note the background mirror-writing.  It may look like gibberish, but it's not.  It'a two quotes repeated:

"Serious art is borne by serious play." (Julia Cameron)

"Perfection kills things before they begin." (Elizabeth Gilbert)