The Path to Drawing: Lessons for Everyday Creativity and Mindfulness

Nurture creativity and mindfulness with step-by-step drawing lessons, relaxing exercises, and instructive practices

Today, many people look to cultivating creativity as a means to improve one’s quality of life, to unplug, to alleviate negative conditions like stress, anxiety, and depression, and to build resilience and enjoy the present moment. Adjacent to such practices as meditation and journaling, drawing is an accessible and personal medium that can facilitate both creativity and mental and spiritual health.

The sample projects in this book are designed to be approachable and manageable in a short period of time. They are not intended to be a rigorous course of study toward mastering complex skills, but, rather, are designed to offer the reader exercises that will help them enjoy time spent working creatively, and develop some technical skills and master simple concepts along the way. Readers should find that daily creative practice and being more open to observing the joys of the world around them can help build qualities of patience, confidence, calm, connectedness, and bravery.

Patricia Watwood is a leading figure in the contemporary figurative movement, and was a contributor to Rob Zeller’s Figurative Artist’s Handbook. Her subjects are primarily women and figures, and she incorporates mythic imagery and narrative to explore meaning and the human condition. Her work has been exhibited at the Beijing World Art Museum, the European Museum of Modern Art, the Butler Museum, and is in the collections of the St. Louis University Museum of Art, and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Her commissioned portraits hang in institutions such as St. Louis City Hall, Washington University, Kennedy School of Government, and the Harvard Art Museums.

Watwood earned her MFA from New York Academy of Art, and studied with Jacob Collins as a founding member of the Water Street Atelier. Watwood has produced instructional DVDs including Creating Portraits from Life, with Streamline Art Video, has been a professor of drawing at New York Academy of Art. She has created several online drawing courses, including 7 Days of Drawing, with the creative streaming platform Craftsy.com (Bluprint.com). She has written articles for American Artist, American Arts Quarterly, and Fine Art Connoisseur magazines, and teaches painting in Brooklyn and in workshops around the country.