A Drawing a Day

In 2001, Australian Textile Fibre Forum magazine (issue 1 no 61)published an article by Inga Hunter where she wrote about a Drawing a Day Project, I loved the sketches of her books, enormous and overflowing with inspiration.

Her fellow travellers in the project were mainly textile artists, some loved the year of drawing, some hated it, some kept going after the year had ended.

The project sat at the back of my mind for a couple of years til I was finally prompted to look into art journalling, along with inspiration from Gwen Diehn's books and Danny Gregory's yahoo group "Every Day Matters"

I journalled spasmodically through 2005 to 2007 then lost the "oomph".

2008 I joined a Flickr group to take a photo a day and was over that by September.

2009 my hand problems started and I didn't feel like doing much at all. I was really depressed with the fact that I had problems holding a needle, let alone pulling it through fabric, especially the fabrics and threads that I like to play with, they are not exactly fine needlework.
But there is a limit to how long you can sit moaning, and how long your friends and family are prepared to listen to it....especially those friends already suffering arthritis in their hands who are in a worse state than I am, and who just get on with it.

Then in November 2009, issue 4 no.96 of Textile Fibre Forum hit the news agents, and Inga had revisited the Drawing a Day project.
There is a PDF file of the article on the Fibre Forum website.
Adele Outteridge sends out a mailing list to the interested participants, so I wrote to her and put my name down.
It would be easy to start a yahoo group but Adele likes the personal touch, she reads and collates all our messages and any photos of work, then mails it out to the group.

Here is a little on what Adele says about the project:

Essentially this is a self motivated project. It is entirely up to the individual to decide how much or how little they do.

The idea is to commit to doing a drawing every day for a year.

You may use any strategy to help get through, there are no rules.

If you want to start at any time, you may.

If you want to leave blank pages for any days, you may.
There is to be no guilt for missing days.

If you want to spend five seconds, five minutes or five hours on your drawing, that’s ok.

You may use any medium.
You may use any substrate……………ie book, single pages, bus tickets, the margins of books, fabric, special paper etc etc.

The most important thing is to make marks of some sort
…..and don’t forget, writing text is making marks.

Your marks may be ephemeral. Drawing with a stick on sand is OK too. You may choose to record your marks or not.

You may choose to set a theme for the year or per month or week.

I like the sound of the 'no rules' and just making marks and no guilt for missing days, but I know me, it's too easy to backslide with 'rules' like that, I'll be pushing myself to complete something each day.

More next post, I'll go and download what I've done so far.