Shifting Lines: A Creative Path to Abstract Drawing
workshop
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Discover new ways of seeing and creating as we use Menucha’s landscape as inspiration for abstract expression. Through guided prompts and experimental methods, you’ll explore how to transform a variety of sketches into one cohesive drawing, layering mixed media to build depth, texture, and meaning. Together we’ll balance the real with the imagined, working intuitively to uncover unexpected directions in your art. Along the way, we’ll apply principles of design to strengthen and refine composition. This workshop welcomes anyone eager to deepen their creative process and expand their artistic voice.

A deeper dive into understanding the Shifting Lines workshop. 
​I designed Shifting Lines as an exercise—an opportunity to slow down and become more aware of your own internal creative process: how you think and feel as you make, how you respond to uncertainty, how you open yourself to creative growth, and how you learn to trust your intuition. The finished artwork is secondary. This workshop is about process, not product.

The exercise can be practiced anywhere—a living room, garden, studio, while traveling, at a monthly craft group, or simply on your own. It can be done at different scales and with almost any combination of materials. I’m a bit of a rule breaker when it comes to materials, and I encourage students to mix and match, experiment, and look for unexpected results rather than following a prescribed formula.

We begin with simple drawing exercises using graphite pencils and/or fine-liner sketching pens. Students are guided to observe and make loose drawings of the surrounding landscape. This might mean looking outside at a tree or distant hillside, but it could just as easily be a bookshelf, a houseplant, a spoon, the edge of a chair, or the patterns on a couch. The goal is not to create a literal or accurate representation. Instead, we look for the essence of what we see—the gesture, rhythm, movement, shape, or collection of marks that captures something about the subject.

These initial drawings become a kind of skeletal framework: a prompt and starting point from which we begin to respond. From there, the process becomes more intuitive. Rather than asking, “What should I draw?”, we begin asking, “What does this drawing want next?”. Students are encouraged to experiment freely and respond to what emerges on the page, exploring color, value, texture, line, shape, in mixed media to strengthen, disrupt, or bring clarity to the developing composition. We may add to the drawing, obscure parts of it, shift our focus, change direction, or introduce an entirely different material. There is no single correct path. The unexpected is part of the process.

The early sketches and marks remain visible within the finished piece, creating layers of depth and revealing something of the history of how the work developed. What began as an observation of something familiar can gradually transform into something more abstract, personal, and unexpected.

And this is where the real exercise begins.

Shifting Lines asks us to become comfortable with not knowing exactly where a piece is going. Students often find this process both challenging and rewarding because it encourages them to move beyond the desire to make something “right” or “finished” and instead become curious about what might happen next. Through repeated practice, we begin to develop greater confidence, flexibility, and trust in our own creative decision-making.
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You do not need to consider yourself an abstract artist to benefit from this workshop. You simply need to be willing to experiment, let go of some expectations, and see where your own lines might lead you.

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Excerpts of student work below: