When you’re finished with your three hours of drawing, cut up the apple. (Though you may be surprised at how much you like some of your creations!) Remember, this ritual is not about the finished artwork, it’s about the process. Focus closely so your brain doesn’t have any time for the doubting thoughts that sometimes pay a visit during creative endeavors. Give them careful attention and see if you can express the apple in its truest form, what it feels like to you.

Use your third hour to look over your many drawings and pick one or two to expand on. Push yourself.Īt the end of your second hour, take a little break. Get creative about capturing the essence of that apple on the paper. You’ll need to release any perfectionism and start drawing in more expressive ways. This time, you’re going to draw 30 pictures of that apple, giving you only two minutes per drawing. Then, sit back down at your work area and set a timer for another hour. Give your eyes a rest, stand up and stretch a bit, maybe grab a snack. Once your first hour has finished, take a little break. You can turn it, change the lighting, change your medium, and change your interpretation - but always, the same apple. You’ll be drawing the same apple for all of your drawings. In this time, you are going to create 6 drawings, which means you’ll have 10 minutes for each one. Use an easel if that is more comfortable for you, or just lay the pad in front of you on the table. Apple is the witch of the wild wood forced to clean up and come in for tea…”ĭrawing materials of choice - colored pencils, chalk and/or oil pastels, markers, paint pens, etc. She became associated with snakes, shame, and fig leaves, and it’s been all dance lessons, curtsies, and domestication from there.

“ Apple has been given grief since ‘In the beginning…,’ when she learned that feeding people and teaching them to know themselves can be a dangerous thing. Something so innocent as to grace school lunches, but so seductive that it has been blamed for the Fall of Man (at least according to Christianity.) As Maia Toll so perfectly puts it in her book The Illustrated Herbiary:

The apple: a symbol of the mundane, but also of sin. Apples are common, nearly invisible in their prevalence. Instead, “A” is for “apple” as we learn the alphabet. (The only way to get the same baby apple tree as the parent is to graft it, since each apple seed contains a different genetic code.) We forget their mercurial, exotic history. They came from ancient Asia and made their way to the New World far, far later, changing form with every planted seed. The apple, a simple standby, a round form that is as familiar to us as bread or honey. The apples that sit in our fruit bowl, that are tucked into lunches, that we eat year-round.

Ancient eating eyeballs ritual