I was so, so, so sure I had blogged about this wonderful online practice shared in 2020 by the amazing Beck Tench. But when I went to find it to reshare, I could not find it in my archives. So today I am getting this on the blog!
On Zoom we have all these little windows into others’ faces (if their camera is on). It is oddly a great place to do portrait sketching as a way to see, to pay attention, to shift out of monkey-mind. Beck pulled this practice from her reading of Frederick Franck’s The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as meditation.
Go to Beck’s post and read how to do it. https://www.becktench.com/blog/2020/7/26/the-zen-of-zooming
Then if you get to try it with others, I’d love to hear your impressions.
I found it really helpful to get out of my “solve the problem now” habits. To really look at another which I’m not sure we do as well online as we might F2F. When we HAVE shared our sketches with each other in all their glorious imperfections (you sketch WITHOUT looking at the sketch) we laugh, we wonder, even blush. It is a very human moment for me.
I’ll put some of my sketches below.
