How many times have you looked at the night sky searching for shapes? And what if constellations were not only up there, but also on a black canvas full of dots?
For thousands of years, people have drawn imaginary lines between the stars to give them meaning. Constellations have been used to tell stories, to find the way at sea and to measure the passing of time and the seasons. And not every culture has seen the same figures in them: where some saw a hunter, others might see an animal or an everyday object.
This idea, that the same group of stars can be read in many ways, was the starting point of The drawn sky, the project that students in our Drawing and painting (tween and teen) workshop exhibited at Traç from May 19 to 30, 2025.
How do you draw a constellation that does not exist yet?
The process began with an invented starry sky: dots scattered at random on a black canvas. From there, each student looked at them, searched for connections and joined some of them with lines, until they had an abstract constellation. It did not represent anything yet: it was only a pattern of lines.
The next step was to look at that pattern the way you look at a cloud. What could appear in it? An animal, an object, a character? On top of the first lines, each student developed a figurative image and gave shape to their own constellation: a swan, a giraffe, a plane, a chair.
Drawing constellations is a way of learning to look: finding order in what seems random, imagining from what is in front of us and accepting that what one person sees is not necessarily what another sees.
Why do we like starting from chance?
In front of a blank sheet, we often get stuck. What do I draw? Where do I start? Random dots take that pressure away: there is already something to work on, and the task is not to invent from nothing, but to discover what is hidden in what is already there.
At Traç, we think drawing is as much about observing as about imagining. In this project, both move forward together: you have to look carefully at the dots, decide which lines to draw and then work out a figure that fits them.
There is also a collective side. When all the constellations were hung together in the gallery, they became a shared sky, full of different imaginary universes. Each work was personal, but together they invited us to look at the sky with new eyes.
What if you try it at home or in the classroom?
You need very few materials for this exercise: a dark surface, something to mark the dots and something to draw the lines. What matters most is not the result, but the moment of looking at the dots and asking what we see in them. If you do it with several people starting from the same sky of dots, a different constellation will probably appear for each of them.
Perhaps that is what constellations do: they are not in the stars, but in the eyes of whoever joins them.
Here are some pictures of The drawn sky!
