Note: Tuesday is Art Planning day. Every Tuesday we will publish an entry geared towards planning, whether it be an art project or a business venture.

Ideas for art themes. 2009 Pia f. Walker

Last week I wrote about planning on being consistent about my drawing schedule. The sprinting starts of art in 2009 managed to produce a good quantity of artwork, but it wasn’t consistent. So, once I decided to commit to drawing at least 3 pieces of artwork a week through 2010, I needed to put in place a framework of what kind of art I wanted to do.

On a big single piece of paper, I started writing down:

• location based art themes: during any trips in 2009, I had taken photos of locations and interesting art ideas. Ideas from Long Beach Island, Monterey, and the Amish valley in Ohio were put under this umbrella.
• action based themes: plein air sketches filled my notebook. During the down times at art fairs and shows, I would pay attention to the people around me. Interesting outfits and kids playing were quickly sketched down as reminders of possible future drawings.
• experiment based themes: pastel pencils are my love, yet during my background series, I fell in love with the wonder of acrylics. I also have notes taken from museum visits and gallery openings, where noticing another artist’s technique popped a light in my head and started off an idea.
• mood based themes: the majority of my artwork is either about discovering one’s self or discovering the beauty in the single moment.

To help you get started, ask yourself:

• Are there techniques that you would like to experiment with?
• Would you like to explore a certain mood, and do so with a limited color palette?
• Are there some trip sketches that can become part of a theme of drawings?
• Is there a conversation with a friend that brought to life a topic that begs to be explored through art?

It doesn’t matter if you have 10 ideas that fit into one theme or not. At this point, write down all these possible drawing ideas. If there are tons of single ideas, write them down anyways and then inspect to see if a pattern develops. And even if you can’t think of other drawings to match a pattern, keep that idea on the page anyways. It will come in useful during the year (more on that topic in the next entry).

At the end of this part of the exercise, I had come up with 12 different theme/grouping possibilities. After the general groupings/themes were penciled in, on another piece of paper I wrote down one of the general theme ideas and then began to see if there were any single drawing ideas that could be placed under each theme. I repeated this for each theme.

This resulted in 12 themes, with about 2 to 6 drawings per theme. Not a full deck by all means, but a good start to a year of drawings. Place these pieces of papers in a binder or separate folder. This will be a work in progress throughout the year.

Next: The actual monthly/daily planning to make this year of drawings a reality.

Pia