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Last Night at Artomatic

May 24, 2012 in Art Shows and Craft Fairs, Artomatic, Crayon, Drawing, Lessons, Other Sites That I Personally Like, Pencil, People | Tags: Active Sketchbook, Aeren Waters, Alayna Rasile, Amy Denniston, Anderson Photography, Andy Fundeneanu, Art by Ellen, ASAP Graphics, Bob Elliott, Brendan L. Smith, Camille Mosley-Pasley, Carmen Eliam Jewelry, Carole Hollander, Channing Houston, Cherie M. Redlinger, Chris Bishop, Christopher Mararac, cupcake, Dan Hildt, Dana Ellyn, Daniel Richard, Darci L. Graves, David Jiang, David R. Delano, Day Traitors, DesignShinobi, DEZ Customz, Diana Quinn, Edwina Chan, Eileen Colton Photography, Emily Greene Liddle, Emily Piccirillo, Evan Goldman, Eye on the Butterfly Creations, Frank Charles Pappas, Gregg Diamond, Heather Hardy Art, Hugette Roe Photography, Isaac Otto Lange, Ishmail Basha Reaves, James Holst Photography, Jamie L. Caplinger, Jared Davis, Jarrad 113, Joanna Knox Yoder, Joe Granski II, Jolene Sugarbaker, Kamykaze Designs, Kirk Waldroff, Lee Lee's Designs, Lisa Harkins, Maria Santiago, Mark Parascandola, Mark Schumaker, Mary Jennings, Matt Carl Design, Melissa Burley, Melissa Vacek, Memebots, musician, pinball, Rob Lindsay, workshop | Comments closed

Yesterday I headed off to the Artomatic building again. It was my first visit to the building where I didn’t have to serve on volunteer duty, which was kind of nice. I spent the bulk of my visit on the 11th floor (also known as the very top of the Artomatic building) mainly because I decided to attend this workshop that initially met in the Renwick Alliance Room on that floor.

I arrived a bit early so I killed time by visiting the exhibits on the 11th floor until it was time for the workshop to begin. The workshop was titled “Active Sketchbook” and it was a lesson on how to fill a sketchbook with expressive drawings. It was led by Mary Jennings and I later saw her exhibit on the 11th floor and I liked it.

The workshop started off with the different kinds and sizes of sketchbooks that we can use and that smaller sketchbooks are easier to port around than larger sketchbooks and we don’t have to carry around expensive drawing materials with us. We did our first drawing where we had to pick one crayon of any color from a bag of crayons that the instructor brought. Then we had to draw the instructor with the crayon we selected while every 20 seconds we had to pass our current crayon to the person next to us and we had to continue drawing with the new crayon we got from the previous person. The whole idea was to learn not to be so totally dependent on just one drawing implement. Here’s my resulting artwork, which definitely has a psychedelic funky look to it.

It has been a long time since I last used a crayon in any art project but I managed to quickly get the hang of it. (It’s like what people say aboug learning to ride a bicycle—once you learn to do it, you can always pick it up again quickly.)

The next drawing project was based on a prompt. This time we were allowed to use the drawing materials we had brought with us so I was able to switch to my colored pencils. The instructor passed around slips of paper in a bag and we had to choose one at random. Each slip of paper had something written on it, which served as a prompt. We had to do our drawing based on that prompt. My slip said “draw your favorite snack food.” After much deliberation, I decided to draw a cupcake since cupcakes are easy to draw. While I love to snack on cupcakes, I can’t eat them too often because of the high calorie, fat, and sugar content. I finished my cupcake drawing so quick that I began to play around with my drawing by adding a plate to put the cupcake on, then adding a table to put the plate on. Then I had an idea that I would own my own cupcake bakery so I named it and gave my fantasy cupcake bakery a cutesy spelling. Here’s the result.

For the rest of the workshop, the insturctor had us take all of our things and go from the 11th floor to the 10th floor where we sat at the Heineken Main Stage. The idea was to let the music influence our next drawing. A hip hop band was playing at the time and I noticed that the bass player had these long dreadlocks that swayed wildly when he did. So I drew this.

If you liked what I posted here and are interested in trying something like out for yourself while you’re visiting Artomatic, the workshop will be repeated on June 21 from 6-8 p.m. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to practice drawing.

After the workshop I went back upstairs to the 11th floor to catch the exhibits that I wasn’t able to view before the workshop. By the time I finally finished the last exhibit on that floor I was totally exhausted and it was getting late in the evening so I decided to take the Metro home. So far I managed to see the majority of what’s on the 4th and 11th floors and I got more floors and a whole month to go before I can say that I saw all of Artomatic.

At one point I played with this pinball machine that was a redesigned used pinball machine circa 1979-1990. The artist behind this pinball machine is Rob Lindsay and I don’t have a website to link to. (He did provide this e-mail address on his promotional material: Lindsart@hotmail.com.) Here are a few photos of this pinball machine.