Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Design Group - Into the Room Excercise

My weekly design group had their first meeting of 2010 on Tuesday.

This group is an important place for each of us, and possibly for very different reasons. My schedule is usually so busy that I use this special weekly opportunity to fill a two-fold need. First off is just time to play, and as an artist nothing usually makes me happier than to jump in, get my hands dirty and try something new. The second reason I love these sessions as they are, in most cases, totally different than what I am personally doing in my own studio. That bein
g said, the group can always be convince to have a play day that may help you get that something special done.

The one thing that we had discovered early on is that we all enjoyed and needed a little exercise to help break away from 'what been going on' and really be 'in the room'. I highly recommend this to anyone who just needs to get things going...

We start with a basket filled with paper slips that each of has contributed.

STEP #1 On these we have written a word or phrase. One person picks on... the
timer is set for 5 minutes... and we're off:

STEP #2 Off in this case means that we have to come up with our own thing relating to the topic, select and cut felt pieces to represent our idea.

When the buzzer rings we then glue all our pieces in place.

Sometimes we chat about these, but more often than not, we just enjoy the process.

We do 3 or 4 of these before heading into the project for the day, and sometimes what came up in our quickie exercises may find it's way into the project itself.

Today we used three slips.
The words were:
sky's the limit; five; d
eparting

The wall shown here shows all of little works.

We finished up the 'into the room' time with a pencil & paper redo of one of the words (artist's choice). I chose five, and the last picture here is my quickie sketch of five...

Then it was onto the project...

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Great idea, and I love the shot of everyones ideas. This would make a great community project. Love to try this on live over the web with you + a group of others!

paula said...

What a great exercise! I may try it with my students! I really like Roisin's idea too!

FabricFascination said...

How fun just to create for the joy of it. Sounds like a wonderful challenge and a nice way to get together with friends.

Rose Hughes said...

Thank you all for your comments, and I am definitely going to want to hear more about just how you do something like this over the web. I'll be checking with you Roisin! I hope you all have a chance to try out the exercise. Remember to limit your time...gets you moving on instinct and feelings.