When I’ve got just a few minutes to spare I go to my art journal, find a blank page or a space, and doodle.
These are the background layers that inspire what comes next.
This is how I fill the scraps of time while I’m waiting for paint to dry, or a file to upload, or just waiting for ideas to land.
There’s a real freedom in knowing it will get covered in sketches or collage, more doodles and scribbles. I don’t plan this, I don’t even choose the colors, I use whatever pens, paints and brushes are there on my desk.
Sometimes you just got to let art happen.
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I’m here to bring a little bit of spinning bright colorfulness to your Friday, and to remind you today is the LAST DAY of the 21 Secrets Flashback Sale 🙂
If this inspires you to play with more color, more mixed media, more art journaling: don’t forget today is your last chance to grab $21 OFF these 21 SECRETS online courses
‘Color, Color, Color!’ ‘Tell Your Story’
‘Tools & Techniques’
‘Embody’
+ The Best of 2014 & 2015
Keep up to date with all I’m doing and making with my newsletter. Once a month or so I’ll drop into your inbox with the inside stories behind the colorful things I’ve been playing with and what’s inspired me this month.
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We’ve just arrived full circle on the latest trip around the color wheel that is TWELVTY, and I’m so excited how this project turned out!
Catch my newsletter this weekend to be first to see the completed 3D color wheel
In previous years of TWELVTY, my year long trip around the color wheel, I’ve created an art journal to document the process (you can see them here & here)
2018 is the third time I’ve repeated the experiment. It never ceases to amaze me how much deeper this color exploration can take me into a creative flow.
This year I wanted to make something new – something more dynamic. So this year my 12 color project took the form of part art journal, part 3d mixed media sculptures.
We’ve just arrived full circle on our trip around the color wheel, and I’m so excited how this project turned out!
Catch my newsletter this weekend to be first to see the completed 3D color wheel in all its 3D-ness!
This Tiny Book is part of the #TinyBookCollective from Hope Fitzgerald over on Instagram. Check out her posts to see more itsy weeny books like this, and find out how to take part.
Colors & doodles from me, words from Marianne Williamson:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves,
who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually,
who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened
about shrinking so that other people
won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest
the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us;
it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.”
This Tiny Book is part of the#TinyBookCollective from Hope Fitzgerald over on Instagram. Check out her posts to see more itsy weeny books like this, and find out how to take part.
If you’d like to be first to see the latest projects I’m working on & exclusive insights into the thoughts behind the splashy doodles, hop onto my email list for monthly-ish updates direct to your inbox:
I’ve been off line for a while, playing in the analogue world of paints and glue and little bits of torn up paper. Recharging & recombobulating. Playing with things like this.
I’ve been off line for a while, playing in the analogue world of paint and scribbles and little bits of torn up paper. Recharging & recombobulating. Playing with things like this.
This book lived on my desk through the first half of this year. Over the weeks and months it grew fat and messy with ‘while I’m waiting’ doodles, with mopped up paint spills, scraps of stuff, with the words and ideas that were orbiting my mind.
When it was all done, I made this quick flip thro vid:
And when I say quick, I know it’s super quick. So here’s a more leisurely stroll through some of the pages, and some of the ideas that keep rolling back into my art.
Stories unfold from the words I’m listening to in audio books and podcasts, and the characters evolve from magazine pages, advertisements and found paper.
Lines of text set against rows or polkadots, knitted together with scribbly handwriting. Faces in the spaces.
Backgrounds from maps: borrow the contour lines, take them off wandering into new places.
Cut out shapes from scrap paper.
Add eyes and whiskers: see them come to life.
“Meow”
Writing down the words I heard and want to remember later.
I leave notes and messages for me-in-the-future scattered through my art.
“There’s a reason why we get the ideas we get.” (so it’s important to put them someplace safe until they’re ready to use)
Then there’s the found poetry from song lyrics, Inertia blue zero freeze. (idk)
Dotted lines around the edges make me happy: as any small child will tell you, they’re really fun to do. Especially in time to music.
Texture in sticky thick paint, like tree branches or arteries, reminds me art is alive and part of nature. And vice versa.
Messing about with perspective with angles and lines. Inventing new people. Anything’s possible in a book.
These words were pinned to my wall of ideas, making space for new things, now they’re rehomed in the book. Keep things you love in sight, always.
Negative space: white paint dampens the cacophony of color.
Opportunity is everywhere. It really is.
Case in point, I collect cards at art fairs, copying shapes, giving this gal a sister.
Copying faces, shapes and tricky things like hands.
Dropped in here and there amid all the noise and color takes the pressure off.
How they look isn’t important when they merge in with all this stuff.
Keep playing, keep making it up as you go along. That’s really all there is.
The journey to fill up my book for @sketchbkproject was almost as convoluted as the pages themselves. This is the Mixiest of mixed media!
The journey to fill up my book for the 2018 Sketchbook Project was almost as convoluted as the pages themselves. This is the Mixiest of mixed media!
If you find yourself in Brooklyn, you can see this IRL shelved at the address: 348.59-2 in the Art Library There’s a digitized version to see on their site too.
If you’d like to be first to see what I’m making and doing you’ll wanna catch my newsletters. I send these out once or twice a month with exclusive previews of my artings + links to all that I’m currently enjoying in the interwebs. Hop aboard here!
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How much time do you spend weaving between polarities?
Along the wiggling line of progress, between way too much and barely enough.
It’s not just me, is it?
How much time do you spend weaving between polarities?
Along the wiggling line of progress, between way too much and barely enough.
It’s not just me, is it?
At the end of last year I committed to a daily drawing practice:every day I’d work on improving my observation, coordination, imagination. Every day I’d give myself at least 5 minutes or so of drawing, not much more.
Just enough to open the flow of ideas at the start of the morning, to build on the muscle memory of drawing, to break through the first layer of inertia.
I really wanted to practice the drawings I find difficult, but to begin I was happy with doodles to see what emerged.
I told folk about this BIG plan of mine, I wanted the accountability. (I might have told you too.)
Just like the morning pages practice, the regular journaling habits, the daily yoga and meditation time, and all those wholesome promises I make myself…
I wonder to myself: is it the making of the promises, in and of itself, that makes me rebel?
“Who am I to tell me what to do??”
In the attempt to outwit my own ridiculous self sabotaging mind games, I ended up bending, breaking and rewriting every aspect of the plan:
Daily? nope. Drawing? meh, kinda, more splashing around in the shallow end of my abilities.
But what did emerge instead was the beginning of some compassion for myself.
What if sloshing watercolor about, writing seemingly meaningless words, letting patterns fall through my hand was enough?
What if I was still creating, still making, still bringing out ideas into the open. What if that was enough?
What if my obstinance and non compliance to my own self-set challenge wasn’t just the precursor to another ‘Fk this, I can’t do it’ and instead I just kept moving, kept making, kept playing.
And free from the berating inner monologue, occasional actual sketching would take place.
In the spaces in between, I can see, this is a part of my process I need to work through, not against, not in spite of, but with. With an understanding that only I can afford to myself.
So page by page, I’ll continue. Do you have a daily creative practice? I’d love to know what shape it takes.
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If there’s one thing that keeps my creative imagination alight, its progressing a few pieces in parallel. Sometimes a piece has to sit and dry, or sometimes it needs just simply to sit.
If there’s one thing that keeps my creative imagination alight, its progressing a few pieces in parallel.
Sometimes a piece has to sit and dry, or sometimes it needs just simply to sit.
It might be in (one of) the ugly phases, uncooperative, or just tired and needing a rest.
Ideas need to incubate, assimilate, to marinate in wet paint or to settle amid the layers of thought processes and ideas.
Among these layers of color and pattern are layers of construction and deconstruction.
Themes emerge and submerge, continually spiralling around, cross pollinating each other as they go.
Time finds their place, turning in turns they cycle into their next phase.
(I often feel like I’m on the outside looking in while this happens)
These images are snapshots of the paintings I’m making for the 100 day project. You can see them develop day by day in little time-lapse snippets over in Instagram#100LayersByMixy
These little videos, in turn, are combining into longer video stories.
The first is out there in the youtubesalready, but for exclusive first viewings you’ll need to clickety-hop aboard my email list right here:
100 Days, 3 Whys: By the time I noticed the hashtag #the100dayproject that kept bobbing up in my Instagram feed last summer, it was already well under way. I was intrigued…
The 100 Day Project begins again on April 3rd – are you in?
By the time I noticed the hashtag #the100dayproject that kept bobbing up in my Instagram feed last summer, it was already well under way. I was intrigued by the challenge: a creative act every day for 100 days. Right away I wanted in, I was late to the party and my 100 days weren’t consecutive, but I saw it through and I learned a lot along the way.
In 2017 I made a little drawing every day for 100 days, inspired by the photos in my phone.
I take pictures obsessively wherever I go, so I had a gazillion or so images of places and things, textures and colors, interesting patterns and reflections, little memories and captured moments of my days. I collect these images for inspiration, but to be honest with you this was the first time I really made a concerted effort to use them.
Every day for 100 days I rummaged through this collection, picked one out, and made a drawing based on what I found. Sometimes it was close to a copy of the image, sometimes just a shape or outline inspired my imagination to take off some place else.
This year I’m doing something new.
These arrived yesterday. 5 big canvases, still wrapped up and I’m itching to begin painting….
My 3 Whys
There are three big reasons why I chose this project for myself
I love working small. Tiny, itsy little & weeny are the scale I default to. These canvases are 30 x 24 inches. Not enormous – but way bigger than I usually work. I’m curious how it will be working BIG for a change.
Canvas. Historically I haven’t got on so well with canvas. Is it the texture? I don’t know. If I’m going to find out, I need a project that corners me into using these. Another direction away from my comfort zone.
100 days! Seriously, a HUNDRED days! It’s longer than it sounds, and it sounds a long time! I plan to pace myself. This challenge will be finding balance, I’m prone to haring or tortoising and not so much in the middle. I want to learn to meet myself in the middle.
As we get closer to the start date my ideas are solidifying, I’ll tell you more about my project tomorrow.
What is your creative stretch? Do you want to step outside of your usual practice and explore new territory?
Are you joining the 100 day project? I’d love to know what you plan to make and do. Let’s meet up in Instagram and we can cheer each other along as we go 🙂
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