Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to say something than to do something? For example, I am continually telling my two boys to clean their rooms, but if you were to see my classroom, you would know immediately that I was not following my own advice!
I realized this past Friday, that I have been doing a similar thing as an art teacher and author. I am continually trying to encourage creativity in my students and in my readers, but do I really practice what I preach? Sure, I do a lot when it comes to planning lessons or marketing my book, but that is not the same as taking time for myself to be creative. I'm talking about doing something spontanious, fun, and exciting. I found out just how much I had been missing this quite by accident...
On Friday, I still hadn't decided exactly what I wanted to do for my wife for Valentine's day. I knew that I wanted to make something for her, but what should I do? Should I settle for another flower/heart painting? There's no doubt that she would love it, if for no other reason than that I had made it for her myself. But would it be something she could cherish and display proudly, or would it end up in a stack somewhere collecting dust? 
I chose to take the road less traveled. For one, I didn't want to do another heart painting (where's the originality in that?), and two, I wanted my wife to be suprised by the fact that I had made something for her and by the image, itself.Now, I will be the first to admit that the image that I chose was not terribly original, but I knew it was something that my wife would love. I decided to do a black and white charcoal drawing of praying hands. Once I had decided what to do, I started to get really excited. I would get to draw hands (which I love to do), break out
my charcoal (which hadn't seen the light of day since college), and I'd get to do it all in my newly setup "studio area" in my garage (that's a story for another day). At this point, I began to question who I was really doing this for... :) Now that I knew what I was going to do, I had to decide how I was going to do it. Just for fun, I decided to do the drawing in reverse. Typically, artists will start a painting/drawing with a basic line drawing or value sketch. Then he/she will work from the darkest areas to the lightest.
What I did, instead, was tone the entire drawing area grey with the charcoal and then use an eraser to draw the lightest areas of the drawing. (Thi
s was a drawing technique we were t
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