Join guest teaching artist Susan Moss to discover how an active sketchbook and journaling practice can enhance creative process and artistic growth. Learn strategies for a sketchbook practice that is low risk, non-evaluative, and exploratory. Work with varied materials – gouache, colored brush pens, markers, water soluble pencils – and respond to a range of mark-making and writing prompts. Experience how visual and written responses can serve as a departure point for reflection on artistic goals, for generating ideas, for recognizing the idiosyncratic patterns of one’s own art making, and for further inspiration.

The exercises and prompts explored in this workshop will promote an ongoing sketchbook habit that will feed future art making and creative pursuits.

Goals: The goal of the workshop is to guide you in developing a sketchbook “habit” that supports:

• An open and reflective approach to art making
• Exploration of your unique way of seeing, responding, marking, and recording experience
• Articulating and refining ideas
• Movement toward a more focused, substantive studio practice.

Materials students should provide:
• 3 ring binder (for 8 1/2 x 11 paper)

Optional materials to bring:
Marking, drawing, or painting tools you especially like, plus images of some of your artwork if you would like that to be part of our workshop conversation

Materials instructor will provide:

• New sketchbook for each participant
• Gouache paint and brushes
• Wide selection of pens, markers, brush pens, and pencils
• Paper
• Additional miscellaneous drawing materials
• Workbook

About Susan Moss:
Susan Moss has been marking on surfaces since a child – paper table cloths, fabric, kraft paper, and archival paper, large and small. Moss’s drawings, mixed media work, and spontaneously stitched embroideries have been exhibited nationally and regionally in over ninety venues. Her work was recently highlighted in Uppercase magazine’s sketchbook feature. She taught drawing and textile art courses at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, for nearly 30 years, retiring recently. Her teaching emphasized fostering student creativity. She continues with this goal to engender and support creativity by teaching sketchbook workshops, including at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and Textile Center in Minneapolis. Her own sketchbook practice may start with a theme – sedimentary rock, seeds, nerve pathways – but usually devolves to something looser and more abstract. Pattern, especially textile patterns, are a recurring element. Sketchbooks are also a great for experimenting and learning about materials. Sometimes sketchbook imagery finds a life in a larger or more “finished” format, but equally important is staying engaged, thinking, and alive creatively, especially when day-to-day urgencies don’t allow for large blocks of studio time. In contrast to the slow, restrained processes of her hand embroidery, the sketchbooks provide a space for spontaneity and improvisation.