Way back in 2012 I heard about a group committed to sketching every day in the month of May. I did some searching and found Wendy/Quirkyartist and Liz Steel/Borromini Bear planned to do what has been called EDiM… Every Day in May. They spread the word to use the Everyday Matters Challenge list starting with #100 and go in reverse order for the month.
I thought it was wonderful that there was a list of 100 sketching prompts out in the interwebs for me to use. Little did I know that I would find the list was much longer. As of now there are 328 drawing prompts! The full list is kept by Karen Winters and can be found on her blog. This is turn led me to Danny Gregory, friend and sketching guru to those of us who found our artistic way later in life.
I started in on May 1st 2012 with #100 and decided to work backward to #1 and then pick up at #101 and work my way to 328. Even allowing for lapses and my other work I thought I’d be further along than I am now.
Sheesh! I was working fairly regularly on the list when I hit #22 – Draw a piece of clothing. I don;t know what it was but the list just kept getting transferred from sketchbook to sketchbook and that piece of clothing never got it’s day. I did plenty of other sketching… I even drew my clothes as I packed for my vacation. But I didn’t label it as EDM 22.
I only had a few more pages to go in my sketchbook and again I thought of moving my list to the new journal.
NO! I will not move it without making progress! … Earmuffs count as clothing, don’t they?
The spell has been broken! I finished the sketchbook (one of my handmade books with Fab. Art. 140# soft press paper) with EDM 21.
EDM 20, 19 & 18 have been the first entries into my new Stillman & Birn Alpha. This is a new sketchbook for me and it’ll be interesting to see how I like the paper. I noticed how white it is right away. Boy, the colors just pop!
You can see some buckling at the bottom left where I painted a fairly wet wash. It flattened as it dried and now seems to be within my “acceptable” range. The Alpha has a lot pages so I better get used to it… 124 pages… that’s twice what I have in my beloved Strathmore 500 Mixed Media Journal. The paper is slightly lighter,150gsm to Strathmore’s 190 gsm, so we’ll see. It’s always fun to try new things.
Dana Burrell... Art 