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Drawing Together #34: Waves with Dana Walrath

Our host for January’s Drawing Together was Dana Walrath. Dana practices a border crossing blend of creative writing, comics, art, and anthropology. Her award-winning works include Aliceheimer’s, a graphic memoir about her mother’s dementia journey, Like Water on Stone, a verse novel about the Armenian genocide, and The Book of Genocides, an interactive art installation that uses artists books to counter dehumanization and genocide. Her comics, poetry, and essays have appeared in places such as The Lancet, Irish Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, and on Public Radio. She has shared her work on the healing power of story throughout North America and Eurasia including two TEDx talks. A Fulbright Scholar and Atlantic Fellow with work spanning the entire life cycle, other recent projects include the libretto for the Aliceheimer’s chamber opera, the picture book I Am a Bird, and a contribution to the anthology Menopause: A Comic Treatment, a double Eisner Award winner and New York Times Best Graphic Novel of 2020.

Dana will introduce her topic and lead us through the exercises in a video she created for this post.

Notes on Dana’s exercises:

  1. draw waves to correspond to these words:
      1. angry
      2. loving
      3. tired
      4. flirtatious
      5. anxious
      6. greedy
      7. hungry
      8. connected
      9. gentle
      10. joyous
  2. turn your waves into characters
  3. turn several of those characters into a comic or scene drawing

If you’d like, share your drawings with the #DrawingTogetherGM