On February 17th we led a calligraphy and mindfulness day at Wiston Lodge with the friendly and enthusiastic members of the Border Collie Sangha. The setting and light was beautiful with lodge sitting next to Tinto hill south of Lanark, with ice and snow melt… Read More »Sansui – Mountains and Water calligraphy at Wiston Lodge
Laying out various materials for the Shodo Japanese calligraphy class on Saturday, such as shitajiki (felt mats), bunchin (paper weights), fude brushes, suzuri (ink wells), fudeoki (brush rests) and washi paper. The pavements are still snowy in Glasgow, so we recommend wearing boots and warm… Read More »Preparation for Zen Heart Brush calligraphy group
The children at Ruchill Community Centre really wanted to do their own thing at this session – which turned out to be drawing views around them. ‘What can I draw?’ they asked – ‘Have a look around – what do you see?’ – so they… Read More »Drawing the community centre, with some dragons too – children’s spring art group at North United Communities
Inspired by textures and the rhythms of lines and spaces in nature, we started with some imaginative marks responding to these themes, before drawing from some natural objects. Ink and a variety of brushes came in handy to explore those textures as well as experiment… Read More »The flow of water moving along the river, the curving lines of gliding birds, patterns in rocks – Maryhill art group
We continued some of the work from the previous session, this time concentrating on stones and pebbles, looking at their shapes and being led by their character to finding different ways to draw them. Cutting and sticking or tearing, we used various papers to make… Read More »Floating stones and flying paper
Sylvia gave us an emergency mission for this after school session – to make a banner for charity fundraising for the work with the young people. So we speedily set to work, all hands on paint pens, and created a simple but catchy composition! The… Read More »NUC Cash for Kids banner!
After a cuppa and a chat about Shodo calligraphy and Chinese and Japanese kanji, we worked on the characters 安楽 anraku, usually meaning comfort or carefree and also meaning ease and joy. Some temples in Japan have this in their name, and it appears in… Read More »Anraku – Ease and Joy brushed with ink
Oil pastels were ideal to use to draw the textures of stones and wood from our collection of natural objects picked up from beaches, forests and mountains over the years! Looking into the intricate surface textures to find inspiration, we started working from one or… Read More »The world of natural objects – shell, stone and wood
Some of the older primary school children at the North United Communities group are already filling up their first sketchbook with fabulous creative drawings and crafty shapes! It was great to see them engaging with their books and feeling connected to them, in this session… Read More »After school drawing and developing sketchbooks
At our Zen Heart Brush calligraphy group, we began listening to some autumn themed haiku poetry before getting a feel for the fude brushes and suzuri ink well with some elemental shapes and marks. Then we practiced some simple shodo calligraphy strokes, before working on… Read More »Autumn dreams drifting on the breeze
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