Four-Minute Burn

My first year teaching I met an enthusiastic fellow teacher, without whom I doubt that I would have gotten through the second semester. He attended Parson's during the summer for his MFA, and brought many of the ideas he got there back to the high school. One of these he called the "four-minute burn."

An extremely simple idea. Each and every day, make a drawing for four minutes. I took that to my Art I classes and even had all of my classes make a sketchbook, wherein they did a four-minute burn at the beginning of every class period. The practice helped my students enormously. I still possess some before and after drawings that I would post if I didn't take copyright law and intellectual property seriously. While the students gave their drawings to me, they didn't give me permission to publish them.

Now I'd like to practice what I preach. I'll be making a daily four-minute burn for as long as I can make myself. I will be using Painter and my Wacom tablet to create the drawings though, so as to take out the middle man of the scanner.


Here's the first of what I hope will be many. A chair that I bought on my trip to France.