Drawing Workshops & Creative Process.
Sketching, creating, playing.
As creatives of the industry, we are finding it more and more difficult to make time to create and play, which is imperative to our artistic growth and feeling inspired to design.
Rock & Soar’s conceptual practice involves delving into expressive and non-judgemental ways of working, for mistakes and flaws to be made within our sketches that enable us to push out of our comfort zone and start to make new work from different perspectives.
Our practice consists of ‘noticing nature’, where we deconstruct the key visual elements, explained in our ‘Born from Nature’ article. This allows us to interpret what we see in front of us and re-design nature for our sculptural light installations. This is often done through drawings and watercolour paintings, which help tease out elements to incorporate into our final designs.
Before working on a design, a series of short drawing exercises to loosen the mind is a powerful way to relax into artistic design-thinking. These can consist of using a variety of mediums such as charcoal, fine liners, chalks, inks and graphite; a nostalgic approach for some that feeds our inner-child of playfulness and making mess. The sole focus of these exercises is to concentrate on process, free the mind and disregard the expectation of a beautiful finished result. A range of continuous lines, drawing with both hands, not looking at the page and focusing on negative space are some interesting ways to get us to think outside the box when observing our object/subject.
Finally, we are able to work on our main design and due to the previous processes we have undertaken, we may have seen a particular detail within the subject or are able to focus clearly on a particular area to take forward and incorporate into our final feature. Combine this with our technical, electrical and structural understanding, all aspects are intertwined to produce artistically designed sculptures with functional lighting.
Our approach highlights the importance of making time to creatively play and look after our wellbeing as artistic individuals. It is a process that can be used in many different design practices and we’re delighted to start our journey of teaching others about our way of working in various in-person workshops that are starting this Autumn.