Drawing Walks

Free Line Collective – Theme “Common Good ”

A drawing project using common good as a theme: Test Animation

Designers, architects, visual artists, students, professionals, amateurs and any other interested people are invited to participate in creating a collective animation.
How do different disciplines approach and understand drawing? How can a group of people work together to create collective artwork?

This project follows on from previous collective drawing activity described in the essay ‘Private spaces: collective pages’ by collective authors GAStyZ drawing group, published in Tracey the online journal issue titled Fragmentation (Loughborough University Autumn 2009)

This first meeting presented the outline of the brief, and developed the brief collectively in more detail. For those of you who couldn’t make it but still want to be involved, please read on…

The Brief
We will create a 30 second – one minute hand drawn animation, over the course of around four meetings at roughly two week intervals. The individual frames will be hand drawn on paper and then photographed (during or in additional meetings). To create the illusion of movement, each photograph of a drawing must be slightly different from the one before it.

There are a range of ways in which this can be done and any drawing media can be used. Marks are to be made in black on white, in any medium of choice (e.g. charcoal, pen and ink, oil pastel, etc), equally the page layout, perspective viewpoint and quality of the mark making is your choice. We will work on any size paper, but images must be photographed using the same digital image size/camera to aid continuity.

We will assemble the drawings into some sort of order through discussion, working out how aspects of the animation will be developed. We will need to decide how many frames per second – between 12 – 30 fps, number of frames will change quality of movement, but this can vary throughout the animation.

Theme

The themes for the animation will be the Common Good and the City Stroll itself. Further information can be found out at:

The animation will be inspired by the following questions – What are the goods that we hold in common, why and how are these under threat from private interests, what can be done about it?

What happened in the first meeting
During the first meeting, we took a city stroll, a derive, a meander, a walk around Garnethill. We walked at our own pace for about twenty minutes, each making a drawing with one continuous line the whole way, marking our journey on paper of various sizes and scale. We then met up to discuss our drawings and have decided to use this method as a source for developing the animation.

Between now and the next meeting, we are inviting anyone who couldn’t make it to the first meeting to carry out the same exercise, taking a walk and recording the journey, in one continuous line, ie. without taking your drawing implement off the page. You may like to use the theme for the animation to inform your choice of route or location. You may also like to think about the relationship between common good and the people.

For Information Times

Contact: Michelle Letowska: micaletowska@gmail.com

or Frances Robertson: Fr.Robertson@gsa.ac.uk