Support for collaborative drawing practices

Those of you interested in developing a collaborative drawing practice might want to look at the Exchange and Draw archive.

In particular the archive hosts examples of a dialogical process of making drawings that were swapped and collated in a 'take-it-in-turns' fashion.

Click here 

Working collaboratively can be a wonderful way of extending your practice and it can take the pressure off you always having to come up with your own ideas.
It can also be done at a distance and there are examples of artists collaborating by post as well as via the internet.

You can download some interesting writings on collaborative drawing research from the Tracy website here

Swarm Intelligence 



Swarm Intelligence have done some interesting large scale collaborative drawing work: see

Even if you dont like the idea of collaborating with others, you can use the methods employed by collaborators to open out your own creative practice. For instance you can begin to work with two totally different drawing styles and explore how the two can come together. Do they gradually merge, or can you make images that hold together more than one visual language? We all have very different aspects of our own personalities, and collaboration with two or more of these can be quite fruitful. Our world is full of competing and very different visual languages, you may want to make work that reflects this.

Paul McCarthy

  

The drawing above by Paul McCarthy is an interesting coming together of a range of visual languages, from the cool precision of technical drawing, to references to cartoon imagery and expressive mark making. He isnt collaborating with anyone else, however it feels as if he is trying to reconcile several different aspects of his research with what he feels is the current state of the world.