Drawing With Scissors
Scratch – Shear – Rip!
Tear that paper into pieces and
Let them fall.
Create.
Finally. Cutting and pasting – the way we did it before computers. Leafing through magazines, not caring about how perfect the models look or how annoying the platitudes from unfamiliar celebrities are. Just searching for what attracts the mind’s attention – colors, patterns, textures, contrasts, repetition, faces, expressions.
I signed up for a drawing course – well, that’s what I thought, at least. I mean, I had scanned through the description, but I was so eager to finally do something in drawing again and so afraid to miss my seat in this class, that I rushed through the registration and payment modules on the website without really stopping to take in the words. Yes, I do tend to do that, sign up to courses and events and endless webinars on a whim. It’s the magic of having my own business, that I am the decider. I manage my professional education and training program and there’s one general rule: If it makes me come alive, I’m game.
Now, that’s not as great a concept as it may appear on paper. I do need to check my balances. Balance the money, balance the time, balance the attention, balance the skillset, balance the credibility of the provider. And oh yes – balance paying work. That, too.
This time around, I knew the course organiser very well and I have followed numerous real-life workshops with them before, always great experiences.
Plus, I wanted to get back to drawing more, so I could make my own illustrations for the books I’m creating. Made sense, didn’t it? And new techniques were always useful. We need new techniques. Can’t make do with the old ones, now can we!
So on the first day, I tuned in to the videocall and was ready.
Soon, I realized I would not be needing any pencil. Nor pen. Nor other drawing device I expected. I had signed up for a course titled, “Drawing with scissors”.
Oops. We were going to cut pieces of paper and paste them together to make something out of them. Ah. Collages, like.
Bah.
I didn’t want that.
But I went along.
And I rediscovered the joy of cutting paper for my own designs, not my kids’. Flipping through magazines to look for shapes and colors that I could use. Digging up fascinating wrappers out of the paper and card recycling bin. Cutting and tearing and pasting, with glue, washi-tape and – I admit, I didn’t come very well prepared to the session of use-different-pasting-techniques-class – spit and water.
Never before did it have such an elegant name, this arts and crafts stuff I had done at my desk as an eight-year-old. But here it was, back on my grown-up work desk: Drawing with Scissors. I felt so proud of my work, I hung up some above my Kanban-board.
Maybe sometimes, we just need to change the title, to give ourselves permission to fall in love with our childhood passions again.
