“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Let your preliminary sketches be as spontaneous as your ink sketches. Then imagine the colors as appearing from within, not applied from without but shining through. Remember the incredible individuality and integrity and possibilities of each line. You can sometimes forget this in your painting sketches, while you are quite aware of it in your ink sketches.

In your sketches you allow complete freedom. The sketches sketch themselves through you, so let the paintings paint themselves through you in the same fashion, and miracles of technique will follow automatically. No problem of technique will exist, in other words.

Imagine the colors as waves of light, not as applied (with gestures) or added onto, but as growing out of, filling the preliminary sketch as blood fills the body.

(Jane’s dream book manuscript does not show in the sketch; at the moment I made the sketch the manuscript was invisible beyond her right side. [...]

[...] The sketch took but a few minutes because she moved so frequently, and I was much amused at her restlessness; this mirth plays a part in the experimental results. [...]

[...] The garden site is about 25 feet from where Jane sat while I sketched her.

Wednesday—late morning; situation more or less the same; am having some trouble concentrating on writing though as I did yesterday; yesterday I did two fairly nice ink sketches by the way. [...]

[...] I do sketches. [...]

(My pendulum related the symptoms to my decision to paint an oil from a small pen-and-ink sketch I had made in 1969. I pulled the little sketch, which was a free interpretation of what I considered to be a man facing himself, embodying certain distortions of face and form from my files recently and decided to paint it. [...]

[...] (True.) This sort of a painting however, that uses figures or objects, but not in representational form, bothers you, while you are strongly attracted in sketches of the same nature. There is no dilemma: you allow the intuitive self spontaneous expression in those sketches. [...]

You did not encounter the difficulty in sketch form, you see—only when the idea of permanency in a painting came into issue. [...]

You should in any case whenever possible sketch outdoors, for you are personally renewed by such an encounter, And the implications are very different. When you are outdoors sketching there is before you a large expanse. [...]

[...] Sketching freely outdoors will allow you freedom that will be beneficial.

When you are sketching outdoors, as a helpful exercise I suggest the following: attach your focus of attention to one small thing. [...]

[...] (See sessions 714, 716 for instance.) Your own creativity emerges, and will not only in your sketches of your experiences—those you have done and those that you will do—but in the paintings also that you will indeed do from them. [...]

Paintings, sketches and drawings will be seen by millions of people as they appear—and will—in current and future books. [...]

[...] He asked for a sheet of paper and immediately set to work on a sketch of what he had seen. [...]

[...] Bill continued working on his sketch, saying that he was not satisfied with it and would try another.

Here Jane, as Seth, pointed at Bill as he sat in the rocker, working on his second sketch. [...]

[...] It would be most beneficial for him to do some sketching at the riverbanks. The sketches could then be used for paintings.

(From the sketch on page 250 it can be seen that parallel lines, both horizontal and tall, or vertical, are present; these are the customary wavy lines of cancellation. See stamps numbered 1, 2, and 3 on the sketch. [...]

Do sketches most of day. [...]

[...] Bill asked for a sheet of paper and immediately set to work on a sketch of what he had seen. [...]

[...] Bill continued working on his sketch, saying he was not satisfied with it and would try another. [...]

[...] his sketch of the apparition; then she pointed at me. [...]

Now: Drawing of that nature flourishes in your times in an entirely different fashion, divorced to some extent from its beginnings—in, for example, the highly complicated plans of engineers; the unity of, say, precise sketching and mathematics, necessary in certain sciences, [with] the sketching [being] required for all of the inventions that are now a part of your world. [...]

[...] Visual data consisted of what the eye could see—and that was indeed a different kind of a world, a world in which a sketched object was of considerable value. [...]

[...] Some of da Vinci’s sketches already show that tendency, and he is fascinating because with his undeniable artistic tendencies he also began to show those tendencies that would lead toward the birth of modern science.

No writing: 1 acrylic—2 ink sketches.

Hot in afternoon, not inspired—disappointed; do sketch.

[...] (Body stuff continues.) [RFB note: Bob McClure died, August 1979, of cancer.] Do two sketches of Bob McClure.

[...] 9, and sketched in my dream book.)

[...] Finally, very briefly but rather clearly, I visioned internally the hanging sculpture sketched below. [...]

(See my dream book for Friday, December 8, 1967, for a sketch of the first vision I had that involved sculpture. [...]

When you mentioned his ink sketches, he instantly wanted to play at painting again, but felt, guiltily, that he should not. [...]

(Actually, each sketch, perhaps four inches square, was done to solve technical problems I was concerned with in the series of portraits I am painting. [...] I might add that I was somewhat surprised at the ease and success of these two sketches.)

There is great struggle within the personality however, shown in the sketches—an infantile nature that yet has abilities and struggles to use them. [...]

[...] I was aware of none of it while making the two small oil sketches in September 1968. [...]

[...] this all continues; I feel a twinge of guilt—Rob’s typing reminds me that I was to do my three hours—but this IS writing; cataloging body-mood changes; I want to sketch the men working—eyes, sinuses, ears and neck strongly “working.” [...]

[...] The transposition of the flowered designs of bedsheets to sheets of paper is great; Rob chose a sketch pad rather than, say, typing paper, I think, because painting is his art while Mary’s is writing. Also perhaps to make connections with Mary’s sketches of her own life. Maybe by using his own art symbol, the sketch pad instead of the typing paper, Rob reinforced the idea of Mary’s conflicts about the nature of her own work.

[...] She was carrying a large sketch pad, perhaps a 22-by-30-inch size. [...]

“Mary shows us the large sketch papers in an open-air restaurant — a setting where physical needs are satisfied in public. [...]

[...] I saw very clearly the front upstairs bedroom in which he slept, and the bed in which he died as a boy of 9. I made a very quick sketch of this mental picture with a ballpoint pen. [...]

[...] As we sat at the board preparatory to greeting Seth, Willy jumped up on it; from there he vaulted up on the bookcase, knocking the sketch to the floor. [...]

(I did not have time to say it here, but when I did the sketch I had the feeling that there might be more than the one bed in the room. [...]