Featured image by student Nathalie Renotte
We can say it a hundred different ways and our Fakulty can encourage you until they run out of ink, but it’s especially inspiring when one of our own students steps out of her comfort zone and shares exactly how she did it. In the drawing above, Nathalie tackled a few things she had been working on (or avoiding!) for some time. She shows us that you can step out of your comfort zone in small, simple ways and that it doesn’t need to be something huge and monumentally scary. See below for a few tips we gathered from Nathalie’s experience:
- Change the scenery. Nathalie tackled a busy and bustling interior scene when it’s easy to stay put and draw the contents of something smaller and more familiar. Branch out and draw a new space or draw IN a new space. Even if you aren’t ready to draw in a busy museum or cafe setting, step outside your house for instance or back away a little and include a bit more than you usually would.
- Pick a new tool. Have you gotten super cozy with your Lamy pen? Or do you stick to the same old watercolor kit because it never fails you? Pick up one of your child’s crayons or grab a skewer from the kitchen to dabble in some ink. Changing your tool will force you to adapt and create in a different way; plus it will give you a fresh take and a new appreciation of your standard tools once you return to them!
- Try something else on for size. Adjust the size of your paper or create some guidelines to make smaller drawings on a big page. Go large if you’re used to working with a pocket sized Moleskine. This will not only change how you draw on the page but will also change how much you choose to see.
What little steps do you take to branch out?
