A little about me–I’m an artist and a teacher and a mom. I teach adults, not kids, and my background is in linguistics and printmaking. This means I’m fascinated with language acquisition and the intersection of how line making, mark making, and drawing affect and influence literacy.
I watched my kid start writing her letters and numbers…backward. That was fascinating, but even more remarkable was that the teachers knew this was the normal process for learning to write. Kids flip shapes around in their heads in an attempt to get decipherable letters to come out on the page. Intriguing!
Fast forward–after working over 25 years in adult education, it suddenly dawned on me that I could utilize those skills to teach art or art concepts to adults. I've worked with Kodiak Arts Council and the Munartet Project as well as the Alaska Arts Education Consortium to provide professional development for teachers. I’ve developed a series of line drawing guides with step-by-step instruction to assist teachers, parents, and caretakers lead kids through drawing exercises. It turns out that adults enjoy using the guides themselves!
The guides introduce a new way to observe and break things (tidepool creatures, flowers, berries) into pieces to replicate on the page. The same mark and line making we use in writing comes in handy when drawing. By focusing on the nature of the line: straight, bent, wavy, we can bend it to suit our purposes and write a decipherable letter or draw a recognizable object. From there, we can use that art for any number of things–a card (such as in my upcoming floral pop-up card workshop), sketches in a journal, embellishments in books or journals, name tags, ornaments, or paper crowns!
