The Drawing Together community convened again on Sunday, November 27. Our session was led by nurse, cartoonist, and educator MK Czerwiec. You can learn more about her work on her website, www.comicnurse.com. She presented this session from the Eastern coast of Lake Michigan, the unceded land of the Kickapoo, Peoria, Potawatomi, and Myaamia tribes. For every section of our work today, you can watch and work along with the following videos or follow the written prompts below. Set your timers and supply your own music if you like.
We started with a warmup exercise built around box breathing.
First, let’s start by take a few minutes to settle into ourselves, and our presence here with one another, and take a few deep breaths.
Box breathing – a few breaths – draw these lines as we are breathing:
-inhale four seconds is the up line,
-hold four seconds is the across line across line,
-exhale four seconds is the down line,
-empty four seconds across bottom line.
-repeat
If this is too difficult to coordinate breath and line, go at your own pace focusing on relaxation as you make boxes on your page.
Make four boxes in this fashion on your page.
In the first box, draw something to represent a joy you experienced since we were last here together a month ago it could be something as simple as an image you saw on social media, a walk in nature, an encounter, or as important as a relationship or a book or something that made you laugh. (3 minutes)
In the second box, draw something to represent a challenge you faced in the last month. (3 minutes)
In the third box, draw something that grounds you – an image, an object, a person, an idea… think about feeling grounded, and go with the first image that comes to mind. (3 minutes)
In the fourth box, draw something to represent a question you have today, or something on your mind that is a question – and you’ll notice in the word question in the word quest… what is your current quest? (3 minutes)
For our main exercise, we are going to explore GRACE.
Moments of grace in 2022
Think about this last year, and moments of grace – however you want to define it – that you have experienced or extended. Make a list of as many of those moments as you can bring to mind. Sometimes I look through my photos to remind me of what I did in the past year, or sketchbooks, however you like to organize thinking about your year. Take about five minutes to generate your list of moments of grace in the last year. Take 5 minutes to make this list.
Now make three panels on a page.
We are going to start in the middle panel. Choose one moment of grace that speaks to you right now. Draw a scene to represent that moment.
In the panel above that center panel, the first panel on the page, draw what came before the scene you drew below. Remember, as a cartoonist, you are in command of space and time, as Brian Fies likes to point out. So you decide how much time falls in the gutter between these panels – your “before” could be 5 seconds, 5 minutes, 5 hours or 5 years. You decide.
And that is Drawing Together session 44: Grace. If you’d like to share your work, please do so on social media with #DrawingTogetherGM.
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