Hard to limit myself...

I am preparing for the Symposium in Santo Domingo, and I am so looking forward to meeting everyone who is coming, both old acquaintances and new faces. I can´t believe it´s only three weeks away!

My workhop, Challenge through limitations, is taking shape, though I am having trouble limiting myself. ;) I´m trying out my own exercises, trying to decide which ones to include in the workshop, and which ones to leave at home, and the more I work with this, the more ideas I get. I have too many ideas now to run them all in three hours...

I want my participants to get out of their comfort zones, and for this I am mixing exercises where you have to work with tools you´re not used to, and exercises where you will have to look differently at your surroundings.

Two examples here:
In the above drawing, I was working with a very juicy flowing bamboo pen, with bottled ink. Very different from my usual Namiki Falcon and Lamy Safari. I had to draw much faster, make quicker decisions and try to get angles and distances reasonably right without thinking so much. The line quality is very inconsistent with a bamboo pen, and in the end you just have to let go of some control and go with what the pen does.

In the pinkish image, I used four crayons (white, yellow, purple and violet) on a small pink piece of paper. This is a double challenge - the small surface and blunt tools makes it impossible to deal with the too small details, and the limited number of colours forces you to focus on values instead of colours. What is dark and what is light, and what comes in between - and what crayons do I choose to represent these values, of the ones I have?
I´m putting together a little workshop pamphlet, and I´m looking forward to sharing it with you during the workshop. From earlier experiences I am pretty sure we will all learn from each other, both instructors and participants - which is just the way it should be.