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Liane Grunberg Wakabayashi
Founding Artistic Director of Genesis Art Workshops
Contact us: lianewakabayashi@gmail.com
Welcome to Drawing with the 44 Genesis Art Cards
The Genesis Art Cards offer a unique way of drawing and writing to help you tap into intuition and experience creativity in areas of your life that you might never have imagined possible. Forty-four Genesis cards guide you to draw, write, and interpret your creativity with increasing self-awareness and artistic authority, even if it’s been years since you last drew a picture.
By working with the Genesis Art Cards, you’ll discover that art is a wonderfully wise and expressive companion, the aspect of yourself that speaks through color, line and form. When you draw with a free mind, intuition presents itself through playfulness, delight, and originality.
The Genesis Art Cards focuses on art, a tool for self-expression that is so instinctive that many of us could draw before we even learned to speak. As we get older, though, we are taught that art is part of our childhood phase, something to be outgrown or given up. At least that’s my story. Expect every creativity session to be unique. You might be tempted to think at first that there are many personalities, styles and artists guiding your hand. Over time, though, an artistic style does emerge with strong themes, symbols, and imagery.
Use the Genesis Art Cards to look inside yourself and marvel at the greatness of what you find there. Art, speaking through intuition, will show you the way to create meaningful links and discoveries.
With love and blessings,
Liane Grunberg Wakabayashi
How to Use the Genesis Art Cards
This section provides detailed instructions on how to prepare for a Genesis Art Cards creativity session. This section prepares you for drawing, writing, and intuitive communication, whether or not you have had any previous experience in these areas or not.
The Messages section presents in alphabetical order the gift and challenge messages for each of the 44 Genesis cards. The gift message reveals an ability or talent within your reach right now. The challenge message reveals an area for potential growth and an invitation to move beyond blocked thinking. The creativity exercise guides you to either draw a picture or discover the intuitive message in a picture that you’ve already drawn. Insight into your drawing deepens by doing the accompanying writing exercise.
Further exploration of the Genesis Way system through connecting with the Genesis Art Worldwide App, Liking us on Facebook/genesisartworkshops and by following my blog on genesiscards.com. Workshops are offered online in private, group and beautiful retreat settings in Japan and Israel. Completion of the twelve session Foundation Course prepares you for advanced studies leading to certification as a Genesis Way instructor.
The Genesis Way Creativity Session
Preparing
Prepare for a Genesis Way creativity session with:
- The Genesis Cards and Experiential Guidebook
- A box of 12 or more dry pastel crayons
- A lap-size sketchpad for drawing
- A separate notebook for writing
- Pencils and pens
- Cotton pads, cotton tips, highlighting pens, colored pencils, glue, scissors, tape, and anything else you discover along the way to blend, define, and explore your art
Creativity from the Abdomen
In calmness you can best hear the intuitive voice. Begin a Genesis Art Card creativity session with your own relaxation practice. It may be as straightforward as drinking a steaming cup of tea to get creativity flowing, or you might try the following abdominal breathing exercise. A traditional belief in Eastern philosophy and medicine is that by focusing your intention on the abdomen, the mind becomes calm and the body receives revitalizing energy.
With each inhalation, visualize that you are inhaling good energy. With each exhalation, feel the toxicity leaving your body.
- Close your eyes and concentrate on your breathing. Inhale from the crown of your head down through your spine.
- Give a gentle squeeze between the sit bones to momentarily stop the breath and then visualize it entering your abdomen.
- Hold the breath in your abdomen long enough to experience relaxation—several seconds or longer. If you feel any discomfort, shorten the time.
- From the abdomen, exhale fully. Visualize the breath moving downward from your hips through your feet.
The Intuition is a Fast Worker
No two pictures that you draw will ever be the same, owing to the many factors that change with each drawing:
- The issue under consideration changes.
- Your frame of mind changes.
- The time of day changes.
- The location shifts.
- You may be alone or with company.
- Your art medium changes.
- Time spent on drawing differs.
- The selected Genesis Art Card is usually different.
Taking all these factors into account, the intuition responds with a unique reply.
A drawing can be made in minutes when it is done with a free mind. You may enjoy spending a creativity session making pictures rapidly, one after the other, with the same Genesis Card. Or you may prefer to take your time by doing one leisurely drawing.
One Genesis Way creativity session leads to the next. In this way, a completed sketchpad becomes a fascinating visual memoir from the world behind your eyes, speaking through intuition. While your drawings and the accompanying writing can be collected in one sketchpad with writing on the back of each drawing, you may prefer to have the writing in a separate notebook.
The Drawing Session
There are two ways to use Genesis Art Cards in drawing:
Before Drawing: write down a word or topic you wish to explore through your intuition, and then select a Genesis Art card. Read your card’s three accompanying messages to get started on a drawing. You may feel more comfortable doing a drawing this way at first.
After Drawing: Choose a Genesis Art Card only after finishing a drawing. Look at your card and compare it with your drawing. Notice the similarities between what you’ve drawn and what you’ve selected. Notice your choice of colors and forms; number and placement of components; left, right or central direction of components; subject matter; mood and anything else that feels outstanding. Ask yourself what the similarity means to you. By arriving at your own conclusions, you refine your intuition. This approach works well for young children, the elderly, mentally challenged, all of whom are already very intuitive.
Tips for drawing:
Let your hands do the exploring while your mind relaxes. If you’re feeling unsure about drawing, try coloring in the background in fast strokes. Vary the thickness of lines, or blend in sequential colors such as red with orange or green with blue. Work up a rich opaque layer of color. If you don’t know what to put in the center, try a geometric shape. An original work with a strong central image is now ready to emerge!
When a picture looks pleasing to you, you can stop. Or, see what happens when you keep going. Is the drawing becoming more harmonious or going wild? Experience will be your best teacher. Over time, you’ll know what you like in your drawings. Knowing when to stop is a sense that develops from overdoing your pictures in the beginning!
You may reach a point when things don’t look quite right. A drawing challenges you to keep with it, even when things are out of balance. Striving for balances leads to a solution and, quite often, to a creative breakthrough.
Here are some ways to create a pleasing and balanced picture:
- Begin by drawing with a foundation of 3 pleasing colors. Add new colors and let your imagination take over.
- Too many straight lines? Add some curves.
- Lost for what to do after you put down a block of color? Add a pattern.
- Feel tempted to hide a “mistake” by covering it over? What shape found in nature does it remind you of? Transform your “mistake” into something natural and interesting.
- Pleased with only a small detail? Cut it out and paste it on a new page.
- Want to do a landscape but not sure where to begin? A big, open sky will tell you what to do next.
Work with light colors, which are easy to layer. My friend, the artist Andrew Boerger, advises to use dark colors sparingly, at the end or not at all. Dark colors, especially black, can dominate when they were intended as accents.
By drawing over the same spot, blending the pastels with cotton pads or swabs, rich saturated colors result.
Keep drawing for as long as you like, setting the timer if your day is filled with other commitments. If your time is generally limited, schedule an appointment for yourself!
Work with one Genesis Art Card per session. If you’re a fast worker, do another picture using the same card. Rest assured that no two pictures will ever come out the same. Each drawing provides new insights and increasing calm related to your starting intention. Spend time with the finished art. Discuss it with others in the days and weeks ahead. Through conversation and ensuing events, the intuitive message with its layers of meaning in the drawing and writing will become clear.
The Writing Session
A Genesis Way writing session flows from the drawing. When you feel the drawing is complete, either flip open your sketchpad and write on the back of the drawing or write in a separate notebook.
Writing with the Genesis Art Cards challenges you to look at the way you interpret life. It brings comfort to believe that, whatever comes to us, we can handle, and life’s adventure provides opportunities to test inner strength. Everything you do or have received—even if not particularly wished for—has value as a learning experience and for its creative potential.
Tough lessons nourish creativity. By expressing this creativity, we express wisdom. By sharing this wisdom, we grow and help countless others.
Intuitive Communication
Begin a writing session by exploring one or more of these questions:
- How does the picture make you feel?
- What do the colors express?
- What is humorous or playful about your picture?
- If the picture gives you a sad or uneasy feeling, what can you revise to bring peace to your picture? Draw another picture using the same Genesis Card to find out.
- What message is offered to you in this picture?
The art that you create through The Genesis Art Cards is uniquely yours, so each picture is complete when you empower it with a name. Put high intentions, passion, humor, and every good feeling under the sun into this name!
Your intuitive voice offers encouragement and helpful guidance. Anything else is not the voice of intuition. Make the creative connection with intuition by:
- Keeping the pen in motion. Don’t stop to fix things.
- Letting the writing fly with a fast pen, with no pauses.
- Raising questions for intuition to answer.
The finishing point can be decided by a clock or by writing until you reach a natural pause or conclusion. If you’re doing a Genesis Way session with others, read what you’ve written out loud after showing your drawing. If you’re alone, consider talking with a friend to share what you’ve written.
Sharing a Genesis way creativity session will strengthen the message and its impact on everyone who listens. Sometimes memories come with strong emotions. When you diffuse the emotional charge attached to a memory, you can create a new, uplifting version of the story. A solution found in the intuitive world of drawing and writing can resolve just about any problem.
Important tip: Intuition and visual sensitivity reinforce each other. Write down the similarities and differences between what you see in your completed drawing and on the selected Genesis Art Card.
