Aimee Labourne: Creative Drawing

“Creative Drawing was a relaxed, monthly workshop exploring drawing as a tool for observation, enquiry, and enjoyment. Running from February to June this year, each session focused on themes such as nature, found objects, or the human figure, encouraging participants to share the grounding effects of drawing from life, whilst also embracing chance, curiosity and freedom in drawing, generating new creative directions.  

We began by exploring line, trying lots of ways to refresh our looking and feel more grounded when drawing, and to experiment with a range of materials. For our second month, we had a wonderful model to work with. The session began with quick poses aimed to heighten our awareness of energy and action. Longer poses gave us chance to consciously pay attention to different kinds of movements we use to make marks, and how this affects our experience of drawing from life.  

For our April session, participants brought objects of their choice to draw. These could be anything – whether found, made, new, old, everyday things, or from nature. It was so interesting to chat about some of the stories behind the objects, and drawing them was a way to look closer, to see and understand more – revealing more about how objects carry meaning. Our next gathering in May took pictorial space as a theme. After looking at interesting uses of space in art, we drew our way around the room with expanded paper formats. For our final week, we tried a few ways of approaching tone and colour, and it was so great seeing a sense of light emerging in participants’ drawings as they worked.

In these process-led sessions, it was wonderful to see such a range of approaches to the prompts and hear participants’ thoughts about what they made. I learnt so much from seeing everyone’s creativity and their beautiful drawings, and enjoyed sharing a more playful approach which is always so important to refresh creative practice. It was so encouraging to hear the sessions were helping participants to re-energise their creative interests and thank you to everyone, it was brilliant drawing with you!   

Thank you again to our brilliant life model, and to Shetland Arts for the opportunity to run these sessions. Thank you also to members of staff at Mareel for making us feel so welcome each week.”

Follow Aimee’s work:

• Website: Aimee Labourne | Artist
• Instagram: @a.labourne