An interesting video came up in my YouTube feed today – a tutorial on neurographic art. I had never heard of this before and it looked intriguing. This art form was invented by Pavel Piskarev, a Russian psychologist, in 2014, with the theory that it would develop more neural connections in the brain. I am not sure I’m convinced of the science behind this, and it is also associated with mindfulness and meditation which I’m not into, but I liked the look of the art, much as I like the appearance and practice of Zentangle without the meditative side to it.
Basically what you do is to draw a free curving line across the page, taking three seconds to do it, with a relaxed arm, not attempting to do anything specific, but also not making it too much of a chaotic scribble. You then repeat the process a couple of times so that the lines overlap. Then you round and fill in all the sharp angles where the lines connect, and after that, you can add colour in the shapes between the lines. Finally you add shadows to the lines in order to give a 3-D effect. There are plenty of images and instructions online to get an idea of what this is all about.
I cut down a few pieces of card to a size that would fit in my small art journal should I decide to put them in there (the images would have to be cut in half in order for the pages to work properly), and I used one of the offcuts to do my first attempt.
This card had been prepared with white gesso. I drew the circles to begin with, using my Tombow Dual Brush markers, blending the colours with a water brush, and when they were dry, I added the lines using a grey marker from the sameset, finishing it off with black for the shadows.
My second attempt was done on smooth card without gesso, using Sharpies.
For this one, I began by drawing a few random circles and other shapes, and then drew my waving lines over the top to intersect with them.
My third attempt had lots of added doodles. This time I didn’t fill out the lines and make them so thick, and when I rounded out the corners, I didn’t fill them in but left them open, addng a smalll dot in each section for a bit of interest. These were coloured in later.
The doodles were coloured with Staedtler fineliner markers, and I added some background and shading with a Tombow Dual Brush marker but without a gesso substrate it was impossible to blend this with the water brush, so I went over it with coloured pencils to get a softer effect. I wasn’t so keen on this once it was done, so if I do another one I shall probably leave out the shading to achieve a cleaner look.
This is definitely a technique I want to explore further. It really is rather fun to do – quite relaxing, with no particular end in view and quite quick too.. As with Zentangle Inspired Art (ZIA), you can adapt this to make more representative images than the classic abstract ones.
It might be rather fun to combine this technique with Zentangle.
Kitties
My yin and yang babies, deeply asleep together!
