Se7en’s Drawing a Day… The Project That Persists…

This has been such an interesting project for us… but let me go back to the beginning. We set ourselves the task of “A Drawing A Day” for the month of June. I had this idea of idly sitting around the kitchen table before dinner and everyone spending fifteen minutes, or so, drawing the item for the day on the list… working our way through it and hoping that we got into the habit of a little drawing a day. It was never intended to be a huge artistic undertaking, and it was never meant to become something that we had to achieve at all costs… Really the plan was to get into the habit of observing and drawing something everyday…

So we started with enthusiasm, fresh sketchbooks and comfortable pencils… and we were off… Day 1, Day 2… and we loved it… then we had a little bit of a fizzle, and I felt the troops thinking that this was going to be a whole lot harder than they anticipated. Yes it was!!! I never expected it to be so hard… how easily we are distracted away from the things, even the things we want to do. This very quickly had to become a priority.

And just before dinner was actually a good time – when I start to run around and get everyone moving and rushing to get laundry folded and dinner ready. I have to say having a mini-break, just chilling and drawing with the kids helped me to refresh before tackling the end of the day!!! And it never made us late, just that little creative refresh seemed to be the motivation we needed to get the end of the day on the road.

After a week or two, interest started to wain… it was just a drag to keep on trying to draw your best on a daily basis… even a short period of time each day felt like too much. But we kept at it and believe it or not we got through that. Once we had made it to half way, we were rewarded with colourful pencils… just for fun… but the lull continued and adding music was hard – no one could agree on what to play – their are eight opinions here!!! So music didn’t have the calming effect that I hoped for… but I am going to persist and find some music we all love…

So I added a day of crayons and drawing from their heads to see if a little fun would change things up. I did realise that my kids didn’t draw with crayons a lot – in fact they are quite precious about them – “These are Crayola’s,” in hushed voices. They are a rare treat over here, in fact these ones were gifted us… so after that interlude I realise we need more practice with crayons. And the next day everyone was back to their comfortable pencils in their sketchbook!!!

And just when I thought we would fizzle and stop we finally seem to be over the difficult part… where initially everyone took longer to find what they were drawing there is now a rush to find the “object of the day” so that we can spend longer on drawing. We have nearly made a whole month of drawing… in fact we seem to have got into the habit…

And here is our gallery… Two pictures from each sketchbook…

Honestly, I love how their sketchbooks have filled up… and I am really impressed that we have made it that far!!! I have a feeling that I may have to invent a lot of sketchbooks from now on!!!

I think I will be inventing another project for the month of July… it really has worked for us and has been something fun for all of us to do together.