Fifty Days of Sketching with #Sketch50 from sketch50.org
Follow my own “growth mindset” as I accept a sketching challenge to improve my art and my message.
Thank you to all Sketch50 creators and participants for learning with me. By sharing our work, we learned from each other.
Thank you authors for the awesome prompts and badges.
Had such fun learning and creating– while learning more each day. From basic shapes to lettering and stick people, improving these skills gives me more confidence to do more. We even were encouraged to try animation. I used both DoInk and Sketchbook Motion.
Want to try: Just join in now at sketch50.org and start your challenge today!
This #sketch50 inspired me to try another animation. I drew the image in Sketchbook Pro and exported it to import into Sketchbook Motion. I exported just the large heart next to add into Motion to animate as “Music lifts our hearts.”
I also learned how to save it as a gif in iCloud to import into wordpress. 🙂
Today I worked with Sketchbook Motion — it’s got a lot of fun features as you can see in the gif. I can make a path, grow more parts [not shown], create particles [stars]. I couldn’t see how to adjust the timeline of events, but there’s a lot more to learn. It works in layers similar to the Sketchbook Pro app I’ve been learning for drawing.
Who knows what’s next in the visual world, but animation to express ideas is a big deal now. I worry, though, that too much may be left to the reader who may misinterpret the writer’s meaning if the voice of the writer in text is missing.
I’m also trying Doink, which has many tutorials to help get started. Here’s my first:
As you see, I’m shooting for the moon and might land on a few stars to help me learn.
I awoke to a new day announced at first light by a chorus of robins, a celebration of the last #doodleaday, ready for April 1st — the beginning of #GloPoWriMo or Global Poetry Writing Month.
Robins announce spring,
Chirping, chattering, tweeting
Me awake at four.
Yes, they chirp alarms
Unwanted, unneeded, yet
Inspired a poem, yes?
Oh, haiku power,
joyous chaos rises to
Humble my complaints.
Ha! And we two sing
Word play- Global Poetry
Writing Month: April!
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Tomorrow starts Global Poetry Writing Month [#GloPoWriMo], or in the United States, it was once called National Poetry Writing Month [ #NaPoWriMo], started and nurtured by Maureen Thorson at napowrimo.net.
So when I woke up today, I knew I wanted to start my April off with some ideas. I started with the pre-GloPoWriMo post by Maureen, suggesting a form of poetry I hand not heard of before: haibun. I love the examples, here, which Maureen shared in her post.
What better way to end #doodleaday than with a new style of poetry, especially since the topic today is: Why Do I Doodle?
I doodle to enhance the message. As a participant in Sketch50, I discovered that topic today is “two people talking.”
So my doodle of two people talking in haiku enhances the message of my morning waking up to the dawn of Global Poetry Writing Month.
The prose introduction plus the conversation of haiku creates the haibun poem. What a fun day of sketching and doodling!
Thank you to Royan Lee for the excellent experience he created for us in #doodleaday prompts!
So — if you’re not sure about your drawing skills, develop a growth mindset and do #doodleaday and Sketch50 so you can doodle to enhance your message or to take notes.
Doodling is writing in images. The flow for each is similar: idea-draft-share-elaborate-revise-share-enhance-edit-publish. And publishing can be private, shared with a few, public on websites, social media, blogs, journals, etc.
For me, and again like writing, I prefer the digital. The ability to cut/paste/re-order/undo/redo just makes the process of thinking through the challenge to create the best message is just such a gift. This is especially important with art– because I’m not an artist. I’d be crunching up paper and eventually be buried in snowballs of wrecked work. I’d be frustrated and quit. But with the digital, I try over and over and feel like I can improve and understand better what each stroke, brush, line does to bring out the image. It’s fun.
I think that’s important to understand for students in writing class: why drearily write by hand when the words are so easily created, ordered, deleted, enhanced with the tools available in digital format? Handwriting? That’s now art! Make it fun, on paper or digital.
The #Sketch50 theme this week is Communication, and today’s topic is page/book/device. Notice what changed from the #doodleaday of “Tools and Spaces:
First of all, you can see that I just needed to copy the #doodleaday to my Sketch50 journal in Paper53. To make the icons I just searched Google [icon Blogger, for example]. Then I could zoom in and create an image pretty close to the icon of the app that I use for communication of ideas.
Sharing Google Docs, in blogs, on Twitter, in Evernote, through presentations [Keynote or Slides]– those are ways for me to curate ideas and collaborate.
And the information is from my experiences, my books [Kindle], news apps, research in Google Search.
I do have a journal, which I hardly use, and Staedtler fine point pens, for the occasional sketching I do for a quick idea– rare. I also do a little ZenTangle art, but mostly in my Paper53 and Autodesk Sketchbook apps. My pens last a long time.
But whatever writing I do — text or image – I just think, get an idea, and then dive in, digitally.
I visited school yesterday. Actually, I was the substitute Principal. It was a wonderful experience– I could see the flow of the day, and found smiles on student faces, which means the school is doing well for kids. I wrote on paper [!] a log of what I did. I wrote “Tootles”– oodles of them in each classroom I visited. Tootles are acknowledgements of students who are models of goodness: Good thinking, good questions, good answers, good effort, good attitude– each is written specifically for and given to one child. I was able to hear good questions, acknowledge a change in attitude, a willingness to listen again and correct mistakes, etc. It was awesome.
I was also reminded of the challenge in writing — the biggest challenge– the start. That first word or image. That blank paper or screen. In my experience, the best way to overcome that obstacle is three-fold:
Model examples [if needed, non-examples as well]
Model and try with students; Share and find the positive.
Conversation: discuss the trials and encourage discussion of what the examples suggest– what else could have been tried or done or reworded?
I found that modeling, guiding a reworking or new ideas, and then having conversations with students, and students with each other, gets them thinking about their own ideas and experiences. Soon, one by one, each student is able to start.
If you are new to teaching writing, I’ve always recommended these:
One of my favorite parts of teaching in the middle school is the sense of fairness students demand. Learning about our basic rights to help them formulate a rebuttal to unfair rules is a real world lesson. Students all call out, “Freedom of Speech!” when they complain, and discovering there is a responsibility and a process that accompanies that freedom from the Bill of Rights of our Constitution gives them the skills to make change. Right in that first amendment it says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Helping students formulate petitions for their frustration at not being able to chew gum, wear hats, or use electronic devices– and receiving redress in some way for those complaints, which stem from their middle school needs is a powerful experience and lesson. I’ve found it to also raise the level of understanding for students for rules, and the level of their acceptance of leadership and responsibility.
I think we all need to review our Bill of Rights, and participate as citizens more actively by participating in community conversations to bring about understanding, acceptance, and compromise.
Here is the Public Domain copy of First Amendment:
My Sketch50 topic today was ‘megaphone’ or ‘microphone.’ It fits with this topic:
