Mindful drawing practice! This is the Mindful Artist: Birds and Botanicals: A meditative guide to using brush pens and ink to create birds, flowers, and more by Monika Cilmi. It's a book about practicing mindfulness while using a Japanese brush pen. A Japanese brush pen writes like a brush. Its bristles are made to copy the strokes of an authentic Japanese calligraphy brush. You'll find 16 step-by-step projects to practice meditative drawing. Subjects are a mix of birds and flowers, examples include a humming bird, crane and fuchsia. All projects are named after a mindful teaching like Joy, Letting Go, Kindness etc. The goal of each drawing is to focus on the creative process without worrying about the results. There is suggested breath work before you begin each drawing. Close your eyes and take 3 deep breaths with your empty paper in front of you. Next follow the guided thinking exercise. You are asked to meditate on a given theme and draw. Large illustrations demonstrate the elegant brush strokes and drawing techniques. They are mostly in black ink, though there is some use of color. Text is kept to a minimum. All tools and materials are listed at the beginning of each project. It's a short list of pen and paper, mostly Japanese brush pens and high-quality heavy paper. Exact brands are shared, for example, she favors Canson heavyweight cartridge paper. See excerpts and the complete table of contents below. Walter Foster released the 128 page paperback on February 8, 2022. Get your copy below!
