Simplicity

 A door has opened these past few days to the words of Spanish. Suddenly, I find my ideas about the magic of being, couched in Spanish: the awesome surprise of it, and the graceful lightness of this gift.  

I want to shout
 Oh! Oh! Oh! 
I want the world to know. 

I bow in thanks. I raise my hands in dance.  When did this flowering of the Spanish language in my very center happen?! 

Degrades de color - Color Gradation

I am continuing to draw. This week we are practicing control of the pencil crayon and mixing colors and color gradation. We were to draw rectangles to show the latter, but I drew a butterfly. 

 I had fun changing the assignment. 

Color

Mostly, 

I like pencil drawing, but I do love color. Here is a color wheel. Maybe when traveling, I can take fewer crayons and make my own colors by combinations- or so I learned from one of my sisters. 

Color Wheel 

Making Sense of Aging

Good Witch   

Aged Spirit

Drawings inspired by alamy stock photo (D47878 and E627G4).

Always Another Door

Still learning. 

I found a new resource: cartoon fundamentals.  As you can see, I can spend many weeks of practice on cartoons! :-) 

Succès Éxito Success Erfolg

I have completed the course today with a final brief introduction to drawing animated figures.  

I was encouraged to use the artist's blue pencil for the first sketch and then a special red for the more detailed sketch. I made do with what I had, so my first drawing looks rather scary. Still, I learned today some more about using simpler lines and less detail for animated drawings, and it was a good review of drawing hair, eyes, noses and mouths.  


This morning, too excited about upcoming trip and life in general to sleep, I woke up and listened to Pimsleur French, Radio Quebec, a rap song in French on YouTube and then followed this dive into French by a video by Slow German on the subject of lying.  

Language learning and learning to draw, have many qualities in common: they provide for focused, in the zone time, slowly build skills with practice, practice, and observation. They require sources of motivation to keep on keeping on. They open the way to fresh perspectives on the world and relationships. They provide the learner with chances to  explore, venture into new territory, create, and perhaps best of all to communicate. 

Final Post Coming Up!

Today, after a break as I focused on language learning with my morning coffee, I came back and completed the avant finale curso (code switching). 

I feel a sense of satisfaction. It seems a timely point in my life of have completed this course- the week before leaving for Senegal. 

This week, and the following 3 weeks, I plan to focus on French and maybe Wolof. I am surprised at how good it has been to revisit French. I have been following some excellent podcasts and blogs that are giving me non-textbook, real life expressions and tips on how to sound more French. Plus, I have been listening to Radio Canada only for about 2 months and I am beginning to feel the French of Quebec once more.   

While at LangFest in Montreal, I heard a very interesting talk on bilingualism and bringing up children in bilingual or multilingual environments. I purchased Agathe Tupula Kabola's book,  Le bilinguisme, un atout dans son jeu. and am reading it with 'impressement' before passing it on to Fatu and Yacine. I hope they will find it pertinent for their kindergarten schools, Sukabe. 

Today the drawing course, that permitted me to shift into the 'zone', was on using geometrical shapes and the center of gravity to draw figures.  

Further Associations

Each door leads opens to yet another door. This has been my experience of life and learning. So, I thought this blog was complete, but on returning for the LangFest 2018 in Montreal, new associations between language learning and drawing appear.  

During the festival, speakers mentioned more than once the idea that being in the 'zone' or the 'flow' is conducive to language learning - both to inputing language to short-term memory, and to retrieving it from long-term memory.  

I have long noted that when I am engaged in another language purely for the pleasure of it and the sense of immediate rewards that it gives me, and when I am engaged in sketching and drawing out of the same intrinsic motivation - for the pleasure of it- I experience many of the qualities listed as those that are part of the 'flow' experience that  Csikszentmihaly talks about. I recommend you take a quick look at the link I have included. 

“A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”  

– Csikszentmihalyi, 1990

Today, I was feeling pressured by a whole long list of activities demanding attention "toute suite", and so it may not be evident, but I chose to take the time out to do another Udemy lesson.  I forgot time and surfaced after an hour feeling ready now to tackle my list of things to do. 

Here is my drawing. As you can see, there is no extrinsic reason to laud my work but it the process was super and the result satisfies me. 

Quick (relative word) warm-up sketches of the female and male human form.

Completion

In my Udemy Drawing course, we still have a lesson on cartoon characters and a summing up remaining.  This course will have been 8 months of pleasure and practice. Since my goals are intrinsic - the pleasure of learning and exploring- I feel satisfied, while I acknowledge the simplicity and lack of reality in most of my drawings. Sometimes, I have felt super pleased with a result. ¡Chevere! Awesome.

In language study, I head out today to the LangFest of Montréal. I have a follow-up video to post for a LangFest challenge. It will be me speaking again in German, French and Spanish after one month of practice. My listening has improved in all three languages. I think my speaking may reflect more confidence, and more vocabulary. 

As with the drawing, since my goals are intrinsic - the pleasure of understanding and having words some sliding out of some storage space in my cabeza, tête, Kopf, seemingly, out of the blue-- I feel satisfecho, satisfait,  and zufrieden.

Poco a Poco

This journey is about linking pleasure to activities to facilitate persistence-- linking drawing to language study, drawing to the calmness of 'being in the zone', and language practice to walking. 

Here are my practice drawings: 

Profiles,  Noses, Lips, Ears and Hair - much practice to look forward to. 

Much needed to create a realistic male profile. 

I have added a French podcast to my almost daily walks: AuthenticFrench, Slow German podcast and website (I am impressed with free quality online language learning resources in German.), and am listening with great satisfaction to my new Spanish library resources.  I am on an active search for headphones that will allow me to enjoy my walk-and-learning sessions even more. 

I learned that the hair around the skull is quite far from the skull and went back and changed most of the above drawings to their present state. 

Vanidosa y Enferma con un Resfriado (proud and sick with a cold)

Estoy Emotionado!

I am excited. The next drawing lesson is lips-mouth. I have just started.   I entered my 10 expressions in my Gold-list scribbler for yesterday and have today's new list lined up. 

Exciting! 

Combining Themes

Threads of my passion intertwined: Senegal and the comedian, Boucar Diouf and French; I reread a chapter in "Sous l'arbre a palabres, mon grand-pere disait..." I must grin and laugh several times. What better theme for my  practice drawing of today? 

A Book Can Change a System

El impacto de un libro

Inspired by a mini-blog on FB that included this photo and a comment on the photographer, I looked up the artist. His name is Jorge Mendez Blake and he is from Mexico. This intrigued me as I have been wanting to get to know more about Mexican culture - partly to increase my sense of bonding so that the energy I require to keep on practicing Spanish everyday will not wane.  

I looked up the artist and, indeed, this work is very interesting. I read about in Spanish which future motivated me.  His passion is architecture and literature- books. He incorporates both; in this photo (he builds these impressive brick walls when he gives his expositions), he references Frantz Kafka, who also believed a small thing, could change a system. (I Frantz Kafka in German at university many years ago.), and demonstrates by his wall of bricks and the placement of the book how a seemingly small object, a book, can slowly and powerfully change a system. 

Muy interesante, no? 

Practice Practice

Practice drawing this week is easy when the current subject is so interestingly taught. We are learning how to draw eyes and noses, and how to change shapes of eyes and placement of iris an eyelids and eyebrows to show a variety of emotions. We have just begun the nose. We have not yet had the lesson on the mouth. I have included a couple of practice sketches.   In language learning, I am now practicing with the "goldlist method". It is fun. I have read an article that says it is a waste of time and that it is inefficient scientifically given the need for repetition immediately after learning something, and then spaced repetitions that gradually have longer times between them as the learning becomes part of longer term memory. I hope I can make my lists for for 2 months and see for myself. It cannot hurt as I have not been able to work up the motivation to use flashcards to memorize vocabulary.  I have also managed with great patience, I must say, to download an audio book by Pimsleur as I want to see if this method can work for me. In the past, this type of formatted learning and repetition has never earned, nor kept my interest.  

My goals are clear: to be functionally fluent in Spanish, keep up my high intermediate level of spoken French, and develop some basic fluency in speaking German. Already, I can read and listen to all three languages at levels that give me great delight.  In fact, I have just listened to the first chapter of an audio book I downloaded from the library: Hermanas by Gary Paulsen, " a thought-provoking tales of two 14-year olds, one a Mexican prostitute, and the other, Texas cheerleader-trapped..."  My goodness! Estoy emocionado.