lines

Just playing with lines and pens

More often than not, music defines where my lines go.

A foggy morning opens up to a burnt landscape. I wanted to paint a couple of different environments in one painting but still aim to be refined. I used fall colors and smaller lines.

I dug up this rock while hiking the Negev desert in Israel last year. It’s sharp and kinda chalky and it feels like it has stories to tell when you look deep into its lines and layers.

There’s a carnival going on inside my head.

Experimenting today with an oil transfer drawing technique. The red and purple lines are oil drawn/transferred to hot press 140 pound watercolor paper with watercolor applied. The oil resists the watercolor.

” Please allow me to introduce myself I'm a man of wealth and taste I've been around for a long, long year Stole many a man's soul to waste ” I have had an idea for a long time to illustrate Sympathy for the Devil from Rolling Stones. This start from free sketching of cloud looking lines and soon i realise they look like atom bomb cloud. Original idea was more landscape version but maybe later.

In July of 2022, Brianna Grier died falling out of a moving police car while having a mental health breakdown. Since Brianna passed, I have been heartbroken for her twins and family but also reflecting on my struggle with mental health. Mental health needs compassion and empathy, not police and punishment. The brunch strokes are purposeful, but I completed them with empathy in mind. I want to keep the composition simple but filled with meaning. The color theme represents vastness and loneliness, but also kinetic energy found in warm orange tones.

I drew this in my Baron Fig Portals sketchbook while on the plane. We were flying on Turbulent West Airlines.

I never understood the power of dots and lines until I did this art! A simple change in the line from straight to curved shows projection of a hand. What a beauty!

A experimental combination of abstract, geometric lines with organic shapes of gum leaves. Pen, watercolour and masking fluid.

Sometimes the flow of curved lines are what I feel good to me. I just let the pen go.

This line from the Stephin Merritt episode of the 'She's A Talker' podcast (referring to Stephen Sondheim plot-lines) got my imagination ticking in overdrive

Two wicker chairs in the sun. One for the waiting, one for the hoped-for. The table between them holds its silence, its place set for bread or talk. I draw what is here— lines quick and unerasable— and what is not here, her presence, waits with me in the white of the page.

I am an art teacher with a master’s degree—trained by brilliant professors who believed that art could do more than decorate walls. I offer safe spaces for teenagers to grow—nourishing soil where their imaginations can take root. And yet… I am assigned to hallway duty. This is compulsory education, after all. So I sit—posted like a sentinel—watching young lives stream past. “Get to class,” I say with a smile and a nudge. The system wants attendance; I’m hungry for presence. Armed not with a whistle or clipboard, but with a pen— my scribble’s soft insurgency. The hallway stretches out like a geometric hymn. Columns and corners chant structure. Teenagers swirl past—half-formed galaxies of limbs and laughter— their orbits chaotic, their gravity pulling time forward. I begin to draw. Not their tardiness, but their motion. A shoulder. A blur of sneakers. A tilted head chasing freedom. Feet flickering like seconds. Each mark a pulse. Each smudge a breath. My paper becomes a seismograph of seeing— trembling gently through the mundane. This isn’t about making art for a frame or a feed. It’s about refusing to leak away in the fluorescent hum of obligation. It’s a quiet mutiny against the clock. I do this on long car rides, too (passenger side, mind you). Letting the lines grow wild, jagged, and unapologetic. Not for polish— but for presence. This is how I remember I’m still alive. Still growing. Still watching. Still choosing to see. Because sometimes mental health looks like a piece of scrap paper, a moving pen, and the simple, sacred act of marking time with wonder.

The tables were covered in white paper. Crayons, pastels, and smooth sticks waited quietly. Then came Lucy’s glittery purse—her 8-year-old hands had filled it with stones to pass along, one by one, to the strangers around the table. We traced them. Pushed them. Held them. Then we let the colors lead: -Red for emotion. -Yellow for curiosity. -Blue for memory. Each color came with music, with story, with space. At the Museum of Wisconsin Art, we made marks not for meaning but for presence. Thank you to Ann Marie and MOWA for the invitation and trust. And thank you to the participants—some new friends, some old students—for showing up and making lines that listened before they spoke.

Many people walk past plants either without noticing them or with just a glance. For the Walmajarri people in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and many other Indigenous groups, plants provide a source of food and medicine. These outlines are of plants that are used by Walmajarri people as either food or medicine. For most people they remain a mystery, hence the outline only.

I doodled these mountains last night (Tuesday) while drinking a Modelo. It was great.

I like messing with lines

Part of my challenge to myself to sketch directly in ink this month, and to play around with using alcohol markers for value (a new tool in my arsenal).

Im Kurt and new to Doodle Addicts. Loneliness and anxiety dominate my life and are reoccurring themes in my art. It wasn't until recently, after countless jobs, countless attempts, and thousands of dollars in school debt, that I realized it is what it is. At this point, I am trying to learn how to express myself through art and build a community without the pain from before. Negative or positive, I hope you feel something and will like or comment. #MentalHealth #GeneralizedAnxietyDisorder #ItWillGetBetter