Slow to post my daily drawings! Because they have me thinking…
Sketch prompt #53: Neighbor. The prompt inspired me to dig through photos I took of my neighborhood for my Sketchbook Project last year. This is the view from one end of my street, looking toward my house (it’s hidden there on the left behind the small-quick-sketchily rendered school bus).
While I sketched, I thought about the way we assign categories to neighborhoods. Actually, I think about this every day. One group of people considers my neighborhood “bad, unsafe, unsuitable for raising children.” Another group of considers my neighborhood “the place to be, safe, a good place for children to play.” Yet another group considers my neighborhood just as normal as a neighborhood could possibly be.
I interact with all three groups of people, and every day I find myself wading through a mess of stereotypes and assumptions and divisions. It’s tiresome. A combination of all three perspectives (minus the stereotypes, assumptions, and divisions) creates one whole and true vision of my neighborhood. And your neighborhood. Every neighborhood.
Funny, the word “neighbor.” Noun, verb, adjective all refer to being near to one another. In a lot of ways, I feel like we are very far apart.
Sketch prompt #54: Seed. I drew this one the same day (eek, behind I know), so I was thinking along the same lines. I sketched from another neighborhood photo of my son and my two oldest up there in the distance… on the walk home from school I think? Anyway, I was thinking about the seeds we plant in our children that help shape their world perspectives. I want to plant seeds in the lives of our children that help to sort out all of the mess rather than contribute to it. I hope we are setting our babes in the right direction.
Sketch prompt #55: Plain. On a much lighter note, I drew my first-ever-huge-German pretzel. I ate it in Munich. And like a true German (as I recently learned), I ate it plain. No cheese (never really did like cheese sauce… something icky about it). Mmm, mm. I tried drawing my sister and I with the pretzel (just to show you the scale), but by the time I got down to the pretzel, there was no room for it! So I erased it (the sketch on the left). Then I decided I must start with the pretzel. It was my true subject after all. But by the time I got to our heads, I didn’t have room for them (see center sketch)! Two botched sketches. I do like how the pretzel turned out (on the right). You might see this pretzel again…
Sketch prompt #56: Horizon.
