Pembroke Designs

Zesty Art; Fresh Delivery

Shake it Up

• Weave Left & Right Brains
• Use your Doodles
• Functioning Unit
• Piece It Together
• Characters Emerge
• Highlight
• Countermove

Weave Left & Right Brains

Weave left (image) and right (words) brain thinking in the process. Allow your thoughts to drift alongside your doodling. Begin thinking about why you have chosen various symbols for a picture. What might the different pieces mean? Is there a story that emerges as you add piece by piece?

Use your Doodles

Work with your thoughts and repetion in design. Start a rhythmic movement, such as the spiralling showed below. Now add a repeating feature in increments, such as the dashes on the lines on the second spiral below. Now assign a meaning to the pieces. In this example, I pretended each loop was one day. At the bottom of each loop I placed a dash to signify a daily ritual-- wake up and have coffee. I then asked myself-- where can I fit a new daily ritual-- 5 minutes of creation. My answer now has more to do with "where would it look good" on the design. It adds arbitrariness and fun, and adds a visual memory to provide weight to the decision.

Functioning Unit

Create a functioning unit. This is a combination of words and images that somehow makes sense to you. It is an icon of sorts-- a simplistic image that you can raise in your mind that helps guide your thoughts and actions toward a more complex end. A simple example is a token-- green on one side and red on the other. A reminder that at any moment, "yes" and "no", or "go" and "stop" are decisions within your reach. Under this theory, each next moment is independent of the moment before. You may have a lifetime of "red" choices behind you, but you are completely free to start choosing "green" from here forward.

Lately I've found the following functioning unit helpful. I first drew the pattern when musing on the main parts of a car's motor. Vitality being the piston, and reservoir being the cylinder. This is where the explosions of gas, spark and air occur in a car, which is the main source of energy to get things going. These explosions do not occur in isolation, but are housed within a supporting structure. Large rods extend down to keep the structure in place, so the explosions are isolated and the energy is properly channelled. I asked myself, how do I propel myself? Where do I get my energy from? Is my long journey going anywhere? What structures exist to keep my energy isolated, channelled? In creating a design, and then asking myself what words should be entered into the design, I was basically asking my subconscious to fill in the blanks. And it quickly did so. Within moments of asking the question, four words came to mind that felt right. Solitude, strength, repetition and flow. I reflected on the words and felt better about periods of my life that had felt wasted. Long years in my childhood when I was lonely, tedious moments at work when I felt underutilized. Suddenly these felt like vital lessons absorbed deeply, that when put together into this functioning unit, keep the exciting part-- the vitality and reservoir, together. Whenever I begin second-guessing myself or spinning my wheels in 5 million different directions, I can bring this functioning unit to mind, and I am at ease.

Create your own functioning units. Need ideas?

Piece It Together

In this next example, I reflected on a common complaint of the workplace-- inefficiency of communication. I drew four separate doodles: a bullet list, a hard-fast scribble (something a person might do in a meeting if they're really angry), a curving path, and a line bouncing from point to point. First I cut each doodle from the page, and then laid them on a new piece of paper. Which way is up? How do the pieces make sense laid out with each other? What figure could I make from the combination? I decided that the bouncing line was the head, the bullet list was the chest, the angry scribble was the stomach, and the curving path would join the others. Next I used pencil to darken in areas to flesh out the figure. And the result? Now I have a figure that is both a product of, and reflecting on, the original question. A sympathetic fictional partner.

Characters Emerge

In this example I have chosen to draw while reflecting on a problem -- something that I carry emotion for and is both important to me and confuses me. I have chosen the second guessing I do at the end of the day. Like a pinball bounced around in a machine-- wondering if what I said was good, wondering what the words and body language of others meant, and wondering where all of that leads me next.

I notice that as I doodle, 3 figures have emerged.

The characters snag my attention. I start to identify with each. I could write a story-- describe their personalities and struggles, or just leave an openness. Be transfixed in the space between attaching details (size, color, challenges, geography) and the feeling of care for each. I come to have emotional attachment to the curious seahorse type creature on the left, empathy for the quizzical person on the right. Even the fiery force in the middle, who seems to be causing the quizzical person grief-- I can see he's just following his nature.

Separating them, it's easier to think of providing them separate spaces inside as well. Safe havens to rest apart and be appreciated, listened to. Not caught in a non-stop struggle against each other.

Highlight

In this activity I lay out 4 pictures in front of me. They are loosely related, randomly picked out from a stack as items that catch my attention. The top right is me circa 2004 at my job, to the left is my husband, below are two photos from my youth.

Next I doodle while I glance at the photos. First I am drawn to my shoulders in the top right pic, then to the flip of the skirt in the bottom right. Next I pick out the 3 file drawers in the top left. I'm not sure why, but I add a lock above the shoulders. I see the light behind the soccer field moves over to the center of my drawing. Now I start to add new elements to the drawing-- not from the photos. I add a branching structure to the bottom left, and then darken in some calligraphy figures toward the middle left. I had been drawing at whim-- not trying to go anywhere in particular-- but now I am picking up speed. 10 more minutes and the original pieces from the photo may be lost in reworked new areas-- more of the calligraphy type stuff. The whole process is unplanned, and follows step-by-step whim. I wonder what image would emerge and what my subconscious might reveal.

Countermove

Identify a barrier, and design an activity to counter it. If you are afraid of “letting it all hang out”, underscore your feelings by drawing tightly sealed boxes, or face the fear head on and draw a block figure representation of yourself with innards and privates all hanging out and revealed. Feel free to lock up, destroy, or keep the image once it is created. What if you want precise control over your actions, yet are afraid that tight control won’t produce the results you are looking for? Try letting go of control and allowing chance to intervene. Drop small desk items on a blank page and trace around them. Twist a paperclip and work with its shadows. Crumple up paper, lay it beneath your page, tilt your pencil sideways and rub to pick up the crumpled impression.