Wrong-Handed-Drawing

One of my favourite techniques for quietening down my pesky inner-critic and getting into a quietened state for drawing, is to do some warm ups with my non-dominant hand….

To help overcome the inevitable ‘fear of the blank canvas‘ syndrome, I use a big, fat, black, marker pen. The wall of Koroni castle, above (did you recognise it?!) was drawn with such a pen, straight onto a pad of pages ripped from an old Greek phone book. Working on non-expensive, or non-precious paper also helps to free you up.

I’ve added these two left-handed drawings to my sketchbook – pasting liberally, back and front, with matte medium. You could leave it at that….but I decided to ‘knock back’ the text a little, with a light coating of dilute, white gesso…

I then worked into the gesso a bit, with a rubber-tipped drawing tool, before finally adding a dilute watercolour wash.

I’d recommend this activity for those days when you’re feeling artistically uninspired, to get you in the mood for creative pursuits.