Category Archives: Workshops

What’s the best way to decode your emotions? Well, drawing helps.

This week we kicked off the month of drawing workshops with brain and hand warm-up. We drew abstract images for eight different words: joy, loneliness, mourning, peace, conflict, courage, fantastic, and RIGHT NOW.

These emotive marks led us into our guest artist for the month, emotive mark-maker herself: Christina Mrozik.

We crowded around the table on tip toes and chairs in amazement as Chris’s work in front of us. The room fell silent for the next hour as we drew ourselves into her work, captivated with the precision, creativity, and emotion.

Chris took a leap not all of our guest artists are brave enough to do: she not only showed us her current thought-out, polished pieces, but also how she got there — her high school and college sketchbooks, still lives, and works in progress. The room chuckled at the juxtaposition between the intricate marks and the dark imagery of her recent work, with the Sailor Moon, mermaids, and trees of her high school sketches.

As we considered her path from Sailor Moon to birds attached by the beak, pulling out sketch upon sketch, portfolio upon portfolio, she said, “one day when you’re an artist you’ll have a lot of baggage too.”

It was important for Ambrose to see that baggage — the Point A that led to Point B and even Point C. We’re all at different points in our art, and for high school students it’s significant to see a successful artist bear her Point A to the world…or at least to those of us at Ambrose.

Chris had further advice to those of us at all stages of our artistic journey:

• Keep trying new things; don’t settle too soon
• Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do
• Know that it’s not always happy and pretty
• Weed out what you don’t like (She never liked cleaning up after a project, so she chose markers)

Chris stressed that drawing is being thoughtful, and learning to see clearly and differently. She looked at her work, and found a repeating nature theme. Thus, she researched birds and different animals, and naturally applied them to themes in her life (death, struggle, symbiosis of people).

She was honest with us about the emotion behind her work — she often draws without a deeper meaning, and then realizes at the end that, for example, the birds attached at the beak function as a metaphor for the inability to detach in her own life.

We are so thankful for Chris’s honesty and openness, and showing us that you don’t get to Point B or C without the Sailor Moon, mermaid sketches happening RIGHT NOW.

This week the rules were simple: use lead type to create a composition on 6×6 cardstock, and wash your hands before you eat…unless you like eating lead. A friend tipped us off that there was a massive amount of type buried at Black River Recycling. After sifting through piles of scrap we came across a cardboard box with “Linotype” scrawled on the side. Students had to endure a similar process one the workshop started…sifting through piles of all kinds of type to find just the right n’s or l’s for their creations.

We got right down to business fitting our letters into the puzzle of furniture, chase and quoins (which is how they coined the phrase “quoining the phrase”) that let us keep our phrase in place to print. Check out the folks at Briar Press for more information on the art of letterpress.

The final product of these letterpress phrases led perfectly into our Guest Artist for the month: Drew Melton, creator of The Phraseology Project, who came to chat us up about typography, starting his own business, and taking risks to pursue things that interest you.

He gave us some gems of wisdom:

• Do internships. You will make a lot of mistakes and learn new styles.
• Be nerdy.
• Get over feeling like you don’t know anything. Learn by doing.
• Don’t feel bad about being inspired by other people’s work. Use it to observe for ideas, then digest it, process it, and make it your own.
• Block out any self- and outside criticism…you’ll get good at it and people will start to notice.

One of our favorite things about Drew is his initiative, if he wants to do something he goes for it. His newest project, The Phraseology Project, is simple: submit a phrase or word, and Drew and other designers will turn it into art…and typography at its best. It has hit the ground running since it’s conception with 80-90 submissions in the first week, and 55,000 visits and 16,000 submissions since then.

He started off as a homeschooled kid, like some of our students, trying to fill his time by making a paintball website. Since then he has interned at various companies, studied at Kendall College of Art and Design, and created the “Porn is Bipartisan” campaign for XXXchurch, in which he road tripped to both the Democratic and Republican national conventions to publicize the negativity of porn on our country.

Drew also started Just Lucky before The Phraseology Project.

The products of our typography workshop lent themselves to the essence of Drew’s newest endeavor: expressing words, letters, type in fresh ink, new and old ideas, and creativity. A big thanks to Drew and to the lead type that stayed out of the salsa.