What makes this type of art making so obsessive…

Warning - this is a long post - it is filled with videos and photos - let me know if you read till the end by leaving a comment ; )

I have been super prolific these last few weeks, experimenting with all kinds of ideas in random sketchbooks…
- prolific = adjective
producing in large quantities or with great frequency; highly productive:

It has not all been “good art” but I have certainly been productive.

In fact, it has been an obsessive production of art. It started when I began randomly sketching shapes and figures on the page and later, adding color, and other random shapes and forms without much thought to it. I mindlessly created page after page with so much enjoyment that I could not stop.

I tried to name what made this type of art making so obsessive and what brought me to the page in a frenzy of a need to keep drawing.

I started googling around and trying to find a name for this type of art making and found, rather quickly, that I had not discovered anything new, but instead that this was a rather “known” and now popular form of drawing called “slow drawing”, “meditative drawing” “neurographic drawing” “automatic drawing” and various other terms. The best way I found to describe this need was from one of the best videos I found on the subject here by Tim Gula: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJYGFwGhHnA where he explains this type of automatic drawing. One of the things he says is that drawing is like “an itch” and you just need to just keep doing it - and that’s exactly how I felt.

I made this process video of doing automatic art:

This slow type of drawing somehow freed me to do other things that felt so true to the type of art I really want to do without having to explain it- and as part of my true nature in art - I had to add color:

I filled page after page of mostly hand made journals, ledger books and more with these random drawings …

I used ledger books that I had held on to for a long time and prepared them by gluing down paper bag papers, watercolor paper and any other type of paper I could find since I found the ledger paper was too thin for wet media - but it also gave me the chance to work on different types of papers.

You can see how I prepared the pages here - https://www.instagram.com/p/CuZaLPsuePy/ -most still a wip (work in progress) ..

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Can you tell how much fun I had creating these pages - let me know what you think. And if you have not done “automatic drawing” give it a try it will give you tons of joy@