artist's way group

About the time I started this blog, I also circulated this flier to a few friends and aquaintances. To my amazement, eight people, including one unknown person via the local library, responded.

At our first group, we decided not to work our way through Julia Cameron's book, as apparently many groups do, but to find our own way a bit more freely (though a number of us were reading her book). Within a couple of meetings, we decided that we wanted to do something together, not just talk about our own private projects.

For the first session of this, we played with inks and paints, watching how colours ran together on different kinds of paper. Next time we stabbed needles and coloured wool into polystyrene balls, finding out about a particular kind of felting. Then we did poetry - one member of the group offered to find poems on a theme submitted by each of us, and the next time we met, we read and talked about these poems. Then we tried learning to write haiku, over a couple more sessions. And, after that, we learnt to draw cartoons.

Buy this time, everyone had been prised out of their comfort zone at least once. Some people had bad memories of art teachers sighing, or scrawling all over their attempts. Others felt at sea with words, and even more at sea expressing private, personal feelings.

Our next project was to take a month to produce something, anything, on the theme of 'Autumn'. Ta da! (as they say in annoying girly bloggy things). The Stirling Artist's Way collective proudly presents.....