What Collections do You Keep?

I started a new sketchbook workshop this week called, “Drawing Collections.” It is a sketching workshop that has so much possibility in it that I will run it again soon in the future. What do you think of when you imagine collections?

It could be a stamp collection or all of your record albums. It could be coins, bird figurines, feathers, shells, necklaces, shoes, lipstick, plants, tools, French books, maps, tea towels, heirloom tomato seeds, or spices.

It can be things that squeak, things beginning with the letters b, things that shine, or things that get rusty.

It can be any sort of thing that you want to group together with something else with a thread that has meaning only to you.

It can be a collection of things you have or things you don’t.

Go to a museum. What are the top five things you would want to have? What five things might have been curated in by mistake?

What are scenes from your favorite book, or top scenes from favorite books? How do you imagine the characters looking from the novel you’re reading now, or look up photographs to draw some of the people referred to in a non-fiction book.

Draw the weather, draw words, draw how music sounds to you, draw emotions. Can you draw a smell?

The great thing about drawing a collection is that it doesn’t have to have meaning to anyone else but you. The drawings don’t have to be realistic or fantastically rendered. As long as it has meaning to you, it’s good.

I do this kind of thing because I like to draw, but this kind of creative exercise can be done equally well with words or in your imagination. I like to record things that are interesting to me in some way or that I have an association with. Sometimes I draw things to record memories. Sometimes, I draw to then let go of things.

What kind of collections have meaning for you? What are you grouping together?

A Collection of Animal Figurines

My sketchbook collection of animal figurine drawings

I made another video today as I added a couple more animal drawings to my collection in my sketchbook. I have a lot of very detailed and fairly realistic animal figurines that I like to pull out every now and then to practice drawing. They move much less than their real counterparts!

Keeping a regular creative habit is something I’ve been doing for the past several years, if not longer. I’m always working on something. I recently started making videos of my drawing process because of prompting from classmates in The Creative’s Workshop. There we are encouraged to post something daily and in a rough form is fine. That has helped me to get over the hurdle of making videos. I used to think they needed to be “perfect” before I would be ready to post or publish them. But with the class, I have been getting better little by little by setting my goals a little bit higher each time as I learn how to do something. Because of that practice I now even have some video lessons ready for live online workshops.

The video is up on YouTube here. You can find my other videos on my YouTube channel under my name.

Do you have any collections you like to draw?