July Tidbits: Blind contour drawing, carrier bags, and trampled plants

Lil’ thoughts for everyone

Jul 03, 2025

This month, I’m skipping the paywall for Tidbits. Although I’m figuring out how to allow folks to give me money, more than that, I want to share with you, dear reader. So here it is! Hope you’re finding ways to stay cool this (northern hemisphere) summer.

Blind contour drawing

A drawing to consider

For some artists, creating is more about the process than the outcome. They focus on how it feels or on the attention they give. In two tours I gave recently, I used a common drawing exercise: Pick something to draw, and draw it, BUT you CAN’T LOOK at your paper.

By using this way of seeing, my groups were able to see the painting before them in ways they might not have otherwise. Repeated shapes presented themselves. A tree that might have been overlooked reveals itself as a prominent aspect of composition.

And, by removing our attention from whether our drawing looks like what we want to capture, we are sometimes surprised by how well we’ve done it after all.

Carrier bags

A lil’ quotation to read

I carry an essay by Ursula K. LeGuin close to my heart. It is called, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”

In it, she relates the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution. It basically says that hand tools—weapons, knives, diggers—were probably not the first tools. As LeGuin puts it:

“…with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.”

These tools were bags for carrying. Bags and baskets and slings carried berries, roots, babies, beautiful stones.

It feels difficult to convey the beauty and power of LeGuin’s essay here in a few words. All of my favorite moments in the text rely on the whole to feel their impact. Perhaps that is fitting, as her essay celebrates the gathering of food, love, and people who can, too, only be understood as a whole.

Trampled plants

Something to carry with you

We had some work done on our house, and I hoped that the contractors and I had a shared understanding of where they could step in a flower bed without injuring my precious native plants.

I was wrong.

As I ran back and forth with my kid to help him get out some nervous energy before camp, I noticed my absolutely trampled plants for the first time. We got him off to school, and then I gave into my devastation, sobbing and shouting, and then doing my best to help the plants recover.

The logical part of me knows that the strong native plants that were hurt the worst will likely sprout again from their roots. That resilience is one reason we grow them, after all. And another part of me is still hurt, and another ashamed, and another is doing its best to be gentle to all of them.