Hi Folks,
I joined Pencil Pirates✏️
My love to Laura Evans for teaching me Art Making Marks with Meaning.
I’ve been practising ✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻
And as I keep drawing, these little people have started telling me their stories 🤫
They are surprisingly easy to draw!
I used to believe that I suck at drawing.
But now, finally free of art teachers, I see that I can draw a wee bit…
…and slowly improve in iterations.
Making these stick people took me back a decade
To the first time I made marks with meaning, and actually enjoyed it : )
This is Warli painting, a folk art from the Warli tribe in India.
I came across these triangle people in my early twenties.
And I was smitten 🥰
There’s something about their idyllic village life. A force inviting me to come live in their world.
I never had a teacher for Warli painting (and I’m not entirely sure my drawings count as Warli art).
But they always managed to set me free!
I’d copy the Warli paintings I see, and experiment with my version of them.
Drawing them always helped me think 💭
I made them to ponder career decisions, to brainstorm ideas for projects and to waddle through my muddled brain any time I felt lost.
It’s another cool way of talking to oneself 🗣
This is a book I can’t recommend enough: The Tell-Tale Brain by Dr. V. S. Ramachandran
It’s one of my all time favourites. A fast paced science book with inviting ideas.
My son pulled it out of my bookshelf yesterday.
If you like neuroscience, you’ll certainly enjoy it.
In the spirit of making marks with meaning, take a look at these horses from The Tell-Tale Brain :
Which one’s your favourite?
🤔🤔🤔
One was drawn by a neurotypical eight year old, one by an autistic seven year old and another by Leonardo da Vinci.
Who drew which?
I’ve been conjuring visuals to talk about Psychodermatology
This one’s about How Stress Affects the Skin :
That’s it for today 👋
Btw, about those horses…
My personal favourite is the first one, drawn by the autistic child. She gets the essence of a horse- it’s dynamic spirit 🐎
Could it be that neurodiversity lets this little girl grasp something we usually lose in a forest of details?
Dr. Ramachandran talks about how some patients’ drawing skills improved after their left parietal lobe got damaged (and set their right parietal lobes free!)
Thanks for reading : )
Talk to you soon,
Swarupa
P. S. I’d love to hear from you! Write to me at swarupa@skinandpsyche.com or get in touch on Twitter.