Sunday Sketches - stumbling onto online art co-ops

Sometime around 11pm last night, my internet spazzed out. I fought with it for an hour or so, then gave up.

Here I was at 1am with no internet! What was I supposed to do?

Seeing as I can never honestly get to sleep much before 3am, I decided to look at some old sketchbooks, recalling the days when I spent more time with pencil and paper than the electronic beast. I started with the bug, which led to the tree, which led to the... etc

So here it is - the first freeform sketch I've done in at least a year.

I have a dear friend on this blog who has indirectly introduced me to artists' blogs (due to her lively comments life), and I have, the past few days, become interested in what other artists do online. I have no idea why it never occurred to me to do this sooner - let's just say there's heaps of things that reasonable people do that don't easily occur to me.

But it's fun! And even more fun are the art co-ops, a very Aquarian modality of artists getting together to pool resources of creativity and support, and create a venue for structure, deadlines, and light critique - all things dearly missing to anyone blessed enough to have spent time in an arts learning institution.

So, here a list of some of these fine art co-ops

• Sunday Sketches
• Creative Tuesdays
• Paint Party Fridays
• Monthly Challenges at Blogland
• Sweet Saturdays
  

So, I took out my old sketchbook, looked at that tree thing that emerged last night, and decided "why not? it was sketched on a Sunday, after all." So I added the type a few minutes ago, and presto. Instant Sunday Sketch.

The interesting part is that the THEMATIC so clearly resembles the thematic of the SS blog button - entirely unintentional - I had not seen it till a good 10 hours after sketching the above. Interesting, eh?

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When i first set out to sketch, period, I was a little nervous, i guess. It's been 2 years since I habitually sketched something - no matter what it was, on pen, pencil and paper - that I wondered if I had somehow 'lost it'. At that point in time I used to go out in public and sketch people, a lot. I have 2 or 3 journals of live people sketches in various poses - not all of them good, but yes serving to keep a hand in the whole live figure rendering process.

Having a weekly process such as this might well be the thing to get me back into that vibe, which I wonder why I got off in the first place.