creativity across the continents

John's sketchbook after one round trip.

I delayed gratification (punished myself?) by not opening my completed sketchbook until I had put Jenn's in the post. Now that's done (ridiculous delay -- so sorry!) and I'm looking at all the art for the first time since it left my hands in February. I'm so touched by the creativity and care and thought that's gone into each entry -- to know that all of you literally had a hand in creating this is quite moving.

Oh, and Peter, thank you for the Billa animal stickers!!

a gift

Arrived in my mail yesterday! How brilliant to see all of your contribution to my book! Thanks for playing!

Petr's Book is complete!

John's Book / Petr's Entry

This is a poster to a Czech movie from 84. To me this movie is so much part of my early teenage and adolescent years and I always love getting back to it. It is a brilliantly smoky story of young love that is set on the scenery of communist greyness, bars and discos, smoke and mirrors. The ending is not happy. 

Not only this movie includes the word "passage" in it's name, it also was part of my passage of growing up. 

I decided to design a tribute to this poster and it's atmosphere as my addition to John's book.

Ink Drawing and Photoshop were my tools.
  

To fit this piece in John's book I cut it into 4 pieces. The final quarter can be unfolded to reveal the whole piece. 

WHAT'S THE ONE THING SARAH FIND WEIRDEST ABOUT SWEDEN OR SWEDISH PEOPLE? JENNIFER'S BOOK / PETR'S ENTRY

I was so looking forward to the arrival of Jennifer's book. The idea of playing with words one doesn't know yet is what excites me about this exchange in general - the way every book forces you to adapt, explore and pursue different routes of expression.

All the pieces in this book so far feature the motif of bird/s.

If your purchase in Billa supermarket is worth 200 Czk these days - you get a packet of animal stickers - some of these stickers feature only parts of an animal - not a whole.  While we obviously give these stickers to our kids I have been keeping these half and quarter animals - mostly birds - as the possibility of finishing them in some bizarre and strange way excited me.

And the time came when these words from the back pocket of Jen's book caught my attention: What's the one thing Sarah find weirdest about Sweden or Swedish people?

Caitlin's Book / John's Entry

Caitlin asks us to explore. I explored my bookshelves. My mind wanders toward travel: Seeing new things. Learning about one's self. Making new friends. Understanding new views. Testing boundaries. And so we have some book spine poetry ensconced in the last three sentences of a Mark Twain quote. 

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did so. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the tradewinds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Here's to a summer of exploration. 

Stephanie's Book / John's Entry

Stephanie's book arrived with an open invitation and so this is definitely in the experimental category. In fact, had I not sat in Petr's classroom this year I would still be trapped in a traditional mindset wherein sketchbooks contained, well, sketches -- literally -- of pencil, charcoal, or ink. It wouldn't have occurred to me that other 3D media could (and should!) be part of a sketchbook.

I recently became a fan of an artist I discovered on Flickr who collages, inks over images, and whitewashes in ways that fascinate me. I decided to play around -- the result being something more abandoned than finished. The base photo in my entry is also from Flickr (from an absurd holiday card photostream). It's printed on an inkjet printer with plain paper with black ink, white acrylic, and pencil added.

A Different Approach to Collaboration & Sketching

Friends, I saw this blog post today and thought of our project. This is about an event in San Francisco called "Sketch Crawl."  You've heard of a "pub crawl", yes? Well, it's the same concept but instead of going around in a group from bar to bar, you go from site to site and sketch. 

What's interesting about a sketch crawl is that the group generates different views of the same site across sketchers.

Have you ever tried something like this?

Enjoy: http://blog.duarte.com/2012/05/insights-inspirations-from-sf-sketchcrawl/

Caitlin's Book / Petr's Entry

The world of dreams has always been an inspiration and a mystery to me. I love the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman and the work he's done with Dave McKean.

Caitlin's book came as an invitation to open doors - and so I decided to open doors to the world of dreams.

Coincidentally my friend Ruth excitedly shared with me last week that Tapir represents a dream-eater and/or dream guardian in certain Chinese myths. See her email with couple links:

This is the dream eating tapir reference
http://www.squidoo.com/tapir

BUT...even more interesting, in the Japanese version they eat nightmares. They are both mythological and zoological....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baku_%28spirit%29
http://www.do-mana.nl/www.do-mana.nl/tapir.html

Hmmmm...even more interesting... 

http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/baku.html

While I very much love collage (in the Dada context) I never used it much in my own work -so this has also been a door opener to broaden my expression. The piece features photograph, pen drawing, watercolour, cut outs from a 30s book on medicine and human body along with some Photoshop.

Loony Explorations, but do donkeys explore?

I was impressed, no, amazed today when I finally tuned in to our ELMLEsketchers blog after some passive weeks on my part. You chaps are tremendously clever.  Jen's raven sent me off into a sphere of birds, I took wing with a loon! I am not sure if donkeys are really curious but I found one in a magazine that looked as if he was "hungry for travel". I collaged it onto Caitlin's invitation to explore and I look forward to more of this creative stuff.

Stephanie's Book / Petr's Entry / Connectedness

We had a brief mail conversation about this with John some time ago - how this exchange is more to us than just creating one piece a month - at least for me it brought somewhat heightened awareness of the world - I find myself constantly visually mapping the outside and inside world of mine - constantly making connections! That's why this mini book from the legendary Mr. and Mrs. series by Roger Hargreaves killed me yesterday as I found it in my daughter's room - all's so interconnected, so tangled together...

From Raymond's Point of View

The weather in Nice has been gloomy which gives me an excuse to stay inside and do things like order gifts for family online, cook vegetable curry, read Runner's World and create. I've been nesting in a way. Not answering calls, not meeting friends for coffee. Basically, I've been a bad friend. I've been mildly self-absorbed which will, in a way, contribute positively to a small part of the world-my grumpiness won't rub off on others for example and I will have learned something that I can share. I think of the character, Raymond, who observes from his basement-he has started working from there too. Raymond came about when I started thinking about the prospects of shutting oneself off from the world. I would imagine this action could be easy with internet, grocery deliveries and imaginary friends. What if we had a balloon eye to watch it all? What if we could sit underground and watch from above? Community keeps us healthy and they say that those who interact with others live longer lives.

One of my friends was talking about his flat in Brussels where the bottom floor was underground. I imagine a little light shining through, mold and a radon detector. At least they had a trampoline in their garden for jumping to great heights. Raymond doesn't have a trampoline and I imagine that his lower back hurts from sitting and his legs are swelling as I write.

Another side to the Raymond composition goes back to my love of the writer Don Delillo and the idea of being watched. Some of my earlier works were inspired by his novel, Libra. Thus the eye and the industrial type building.

Petr's Book/John's Entry

Petr's sketchbook went on a journey with me, traveling some 4,080 kilometers into the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, visiting Grand Turk, Puerto Rico, St. Martin, and the Bahamas. In the end, after thinking through several concepts involving forest animals, trees and human faces, I was ultimately inspired by the waters I traversed. I sketched this while sitting in the ship's library one afternoon at sea somewhere between St. Martin and the Bahamas. These tarpon fish, with their big black eyes, seemed to fit the theme. Petr's raindrops continue into the scene, becoming tiny fish in the background.

Stephanie's Book / Petr's Entry

When I got Steph's book in my mailbox I was shivering with excitement ... what's her theme gonna be? Found out that the piece she uploaded to our blog earlier is her actual starting point and that really got me happy! Across these various exchanges I'm in I often take a lot of time to craft my responses in great detail and conceptualize my thinking behind it beforehand and so I welcome opportunities to simply go with the flow...


Steph's piece is featuring a dominant motif of a hand - and I knew that a hand will be my starting point too - I opened a newspaper the same day I made this spontaneous decision and there's a photograph featuring a hand holding a camera right in front of me - I cut it out and stuck it in. I avoid taking photos with flash as much as I can - and that's how the flesh made it in ... and the rest simply happened without me having the ability to really explain any of it.

Love of Language

Thanks to John and my aging mind, I seem to work better under pressure. I searched all over Nice for a Moleskine, ordered one on Amazon that didn't arrive and luckily found what I was looking for on holiday in Sweden. Most of what I've done, I did on the plane. This is where John and pressure come in. I'm a plane spotter but terrified of flying. Thanks to the pens that John gave to me, I concentrate on line and color rather than turbulence and crashing. So, I made use of some delicious paper that I found at a gorgeous paper store in Stockholm, included the raven and a few Swedish words and this is the result.

My theme centers on both communication and language as well as text and image. I've included a variety of questions and words in the back so that you may have some fun playing around with text and image. The current exhibition of Eija-Liisa Ahtila at the Moderna Museet got me thinking about how we communicate both verbally and visually. Conversations with my French/English travel companion made us laugh when we discovered how often we miscommunicated using the same language. He often uses big, complicated words that I don't know and we often came away from an exhibition with completely different opinions. Language just makes for a spicy, meaningful life.

Sketchbook was put in the post this morning. Phew.

An Embarrassment of Riches

I just wanted to provide a glimpse of the joy of having three sketchbooks on my hands this morning -- my sketchbook from our workshop with Petr, the project sketchbook Petr sent me, and my new project sketchbook which started making its way to Monaco this afternoon. I laughed out loud at one point because I kept having to open them up to remember which one was which (and to be sure I didn't send out the wrong one!). Petr, you must have a ton of these -- do you put little marks on them to tell them apart?

John's Sketchbook - Entry 1

The theme for my sketchbook is "passage." This could refer to many things. For instance:

• a section of written work
• a rite of passage
• a portion of musical work
• the act of passing from one place or condition to another
• freedom to pass
• a journey
• a channel or opening
• or any number of interpretations from your perspective!

I was inspired to capture some of my time in Prague and elected to remember modes of passage, things seen, placed visited, and inspirations borrowed...

Petr's Book / Entry One

I’m kind of in love with my monster. 

In the back pocket of my book you’ll find a couple eyes to pick from and use one or two as a part of your own piece – how essential, dominant or peripheral part of your piece they’ll become will be up to you. 

I’m really into monsters right now and so when I picked “my eye” all I knew was that it will be a monster’s eye – what kind of monster I had no idea. I stuck the eye into the format and miraculously I was right in the flow – making the rest was joyful and somewhat easy – it just all fell in place. And so here he is. 

ps: When you get my book feel free to take more than one spread – there’s plenty space!

Thursday afternoon

Thursday afternoon: tons of tasks awaiting. Yet I make the time to scribble a doodle, cut and paste for my ELMLE sketchbook team. Once again proof that we need to stop and smell the roses.

"Pretty Sketchy" Photo Pool on Flickr

Friends,

I thought you'd find this group image pool on Flickr interesting. It's a growing set of sketches submitted by Flickr users everywhere.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/prettysketchy/

-->john

Themes

Hello All! Petr, I appreciated your suggestion that we set up a "new/different/altered" theme for our books. I'm thinking about starting a new one altogether and pondering themes. I was curious what others were considering as the theme for their sketchbooks. I'd love to hear all of your thoughts.

Winter in SLOW MOTION

Hallo, all!
Wonderful to be joining you here on this page...
I discovered the following today, and wanted to share: 
http://vimeo.com/35668241
Also, a photo of my own capturing of winter:

Enjoy playing in the snow,
Caitlin

WELCOME

Welcome Sketchers and visitors!  

This blog exists as a venue for ELMLE Sketchbook Exchange participants. We're a group of 5 not only Visual Arts teachers from around the world.

The ELMLEsketchers blog is a good way to communicate with the whole group, to see the progress of books that we wouldn't otherwise see until the very end and to just have a public place to show off our creative efforts.

Sketchers, please take a second to add a "shout out" to the group and then post a photograph or scan of your first of many entries.  Thanks to you all for playing!

For our visitors, we’re glad you made it to our blog and we hope you enjoy the work.