Three Materials, One Statement

You will need:

Paper
Three different kinds of materials

Instructions:

Find three different kinds of materials to create images with. Try to pick materials that are good for different things, like, instead of a pencil, a pen, and a marker that are all drawing tools, aim for materials you need to use in different ways. What would be good for shape, texture, geometric line, organic line, atmosphere, what might you subtract, or collage, etc…? Could you cut and paste one, paint with one, and draw with the last? Pick three (or four) materials.
Leaving space at the top of your panels for text, create 4-6 abstract images. Don’t worry too much about what they look like at the start, just try to make interesting compositions. Once you’re in the swing of things though, see if you can create a simple progression or change from the first panel to the last. For example, maybe the images get more (or less) cluttered, or you transition from one dominant material to another, or compositions go from organic to geometric?
Now add a statement. It can be about anything but you might try to find a statement that has some kind of reveal or twist at the end.

Example 1 (pencil, orange washi tape, blue dot stickers):

Example 2 (pencil, black dot washi tape, red dot stickers, blue gauche):

Thoughts:

I’ve found that, when building abstract images, using more than one material at a time greatly increases my engagement with the process. I’m not sure why this is exactly, but when I use only one material I think I just get a bit… bored? I actually have a similar problem with longer narrative works as well. Like, I find that if I only have one thing to say, the story runs out of steam pretty quickly, but if I have a few different ideas I want to explore or link, I can hop from one point to another for quite a while. I see this play out in a lot of books too, where an author will tell a story about one character and, when a scene wraps up, they just jump to another character doing something else.

Maybe making images is similar? Like, maybe each material can be treated as a character with it’s own distinct personality and, by including a few different materials and letting them bounce off each other, we can avoid getting bored any one of them individually?

Weird, but I think that’s how it works for me.