Drawing Lab

A huge thank you to the folks who mentioned Carla Sonheim's Drawing Lab. I did some work on the first exercise today:

"sitting or lying on your bed, take cardstock and a colored extra-fine marker and draw 30 or more cats from your imagination."

I love her idea that creativity blossoms when you impose more strictures on your exercise, not fewer.

So here are a few of my imaginary kitties.

I'm still working on a quilt for a friend, and still preparing to teach a couple of one-hour classes to kids at a community center in a disadvantaged area of town next month. They will be based on the Watts Towers to go with our theme of "urbanology", our word for urban art. The first week will be a whimsical sculpture activity with wire, beads and buttons, and wooden blocks to mount the wire structures on. The second week will be a hand cranked toy using tin cans as a housing, and bent wire for the crank, and again wire and beads for a moving sculpture coming out of a hole in top of the can. I'm having a little trouble getting a prototype together of this--- I need to figure out an easy and cheap way to keep the moving sculpture in place on the hand crank while still letting it move around the crank. I am thinking maybe styrofoam peanuts on each side of the sculpture? Does that make any sense? If anybody reading understand what I am trying to say and has any ideas, I'd be grateful.