Not in the Mood for Whimsy

The third Sketchbook Revival presentation I’ve followed along with — to a point — was by Carla Sonheim, who offered a workshop on whimsical drawings using the “continuous line” drawing method. I recently mentioned continuous line drawings as one good exercise for improving our observational abilities. While Carla Sonheim does remind us that it’s important for us to look closely at objects we want to draw, that was not what this program was all about.

Quite the opposite, actually. According to Sonheim, this “one-liner” exercise is just a great little thing to do when we’re feeling stuck or if we’re needing a bit of inspiration. Honestly, I didn’t get a lot from this workshop. In fact, it took me two days to complete this simple little project:

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I don’t find it especially inspiring in any way. I don’t consider it beautiful, or fun, or even interesting. I don’t see any real “whimsy” in this very simple drawing.

As I said above, the point wasn’t to improve observational skills. We had no references for the various things we were prompted to draw: cats, elephants, flowers in vases, and toilets. Yes, toilets. Supposedly we already know what these things look like, so we were just to put our marker down on the page and start drawing, completing the image with one single line.

The results, of course, were expected to be wonky, misshapen, out of proportion. That’s where the ideas of fun and whimsy come from. Of course, I excel at wonky, misshapen, out of proportion drawings! But I just wasn’t really in the mood for whimsical creations, I guess. I didn’t see anything too playful in any of the images I created.

For the second part of the program we were to take one of our one-liners and use it as inspiration for a “real drawing” — albeit a “real whimsical drawing”. Again, I just wasn’t feeling that sense of whimsical magic required. I chose one of the “one-liner” flower drawings:

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Now, definitely I can see that this one-liner is more “playful” than my finished drawing. It’s loose. It’s carefree. It’s lopsided, and a bit silly. That’s what it’s supposed to be. But I couldn’t understand, really, how I was supposed to carry this “whimsical feeling” into an actual drawing.

So, let me ask –in all seriousness — what makes this drawing “whimsical”? Is it the slight tilt of the vase? The sort of “unfinished” look of the flowers? The thick stems?

In doing my “real drawing”, I lost all the whimsy. I tried to straighten out the vase. I added stems going down to the bottom. I tried to make “real” flowers. In doing this, I lost all of the playfulness and ended up with a boring, overly-simple drawing.

There was a third part to the program — using collage papers to create a whimsical image once again based on one of our one-liners. I opted out. I don’t enjoy collage, I didn’t care for any of the one-liners I’d made, and the long and short of it was that I just wasn’t in the mood for whimsy.

When I look around my studio, I see lots of “fun” and “whimsical” drawings. Many of them are favorites. Whimsical drawings have character and personality; whimsical drawings can make us smile. Surprisingly, though, whimsical art isn’t always as easy to create as it might seem to be. As I’ve learned from following along with this presentation, we have to be in the right mood. We have to approach it in a playful way. We have to have fun with it.

Maybe I’ll give this presentation another try at another time. Instead of using colored pencils (as suggested), maybe I’ll grab my gansai again to add bits of color. Or maybe one day, if I’m really in a fun mood, I might make a flower collage.

But, not today. Today just isn’t a day for whimsical art.

DO YOUR MOODS AFFECT THE ART YOU MAKE?