If you’d like to help me clear space to make more colorful things, take a hop over to my Etsy store …HALF PRICE while stocks last
Offer Closes 31 July 2018! Last chance, folks!
Last year I created some postcards from from drawings, including these from the 100 day project I did last year.
If you’d like to help me clear space to make more colorful things, take a hop over to my Etsy store and scoop up one of the last postcard sets. Especially for you lovely folks who subscribe to my newsletter, they are HALF PRICE while stocks last.
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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!
(Join up in June to snap up a massivenormous bargain in my Etsy Shop so I can make space for more new goodies coming soon)
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.
If you’d like more of my art based thoughts delivered right to your inbox once or twice a month, you can sign up here for updates
(and I’ll send you my ebook A Year full of Color as a thank you for joining)
Your email is utterly safe to me. It will be wrapped up snug and nestled with a hot water bottle & a kitten until summer arrives.
Since last summer when it arrived, I was chasing my tail with ideas for this project. Four days before the deadline I declared it finished and posted it off to its new home in Brooklyn Art Library.
Since last summer when it arrived, I was chasing my tail with ideas for this project. Three days before the deadline I declared it finished and posted it off to its new home in Brooklyn Art Library.
You might remember my first ‘best laid’ plans disintegrated along with the pages of this book on contact with watercolor.
Having decided to rebind the book in delicious watercolor paper I went off track from my plan and ended up making a bunch of pretty doodles in watercolor, that were fun to make but missed the point of what I wanted to make, and the rebound book sat on my desk for a while in a state of finished-but-no-finished.
Something didn’t feel right.
I couldn’t get myself to film a flip through until when I finally did the edit went all catawompus. I was standing in my own way to package it up to post, to take those last steps.
It felt too mimsy and not very Mixy.
I kept coming back to the thought that if this is going into a collection that can be seen by anyone and possibly by no-one. In a library of + 36,000 books it should, nonetheless, be representative of what I am.
It should be more me.
A little over a week before the deadline to post it off I was awoken by vivid dreams telling me to begin again: Go back to my first idea. Do it now.
I got up that morning and tore out the fancy watercolor paper pages.
For reasons unknown to me up until then I’d kept those first pages. The original paper with holes where the paint seeped through, with scratchy ballpoint lines and un-erasable pencil lines underneath.
The voice in my dream was saying IT’S A SKETCHBOOK. It’s meant to be sketchy. It’s meant to be about ideas, not nice paintings.
I needed to work around the worn through holes, paint over and collage around the layers of ideas. I needed to fill the book with the thoughts and words and shapes that were torrenting around in my head. That’s the point of a sketchbook. That’s what sketching is.
I spent that weekend sat on the floor of my studio, surrounded with collage cuttings and clippings, paints, pens and inks.
I doodled my little heart out.
I sewed in sequins and crocheted page edges.
I rebound the old pages along with drawings I made decades ago. I poured in words that floated through from podcasts and song lyrics as I went.
If you’d like to see a full flip through of these pages, hop onto my email list here for an exclusive preview next week.
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 youtubes already, but for exclusive first viewings you’ll need to clickety-hop aboard my email list right here:
Today we reached the quarter way mark, day 25 of the #100dayproject.
To celebrate I’ve joined up the videos of the first layers of the first canvas I began working on. It’s still a work in progress, but already it’s been through so many evolutions.
I like an outrageously crazy challenge as much as the next person.
I’ve been known to dive into some over ambitious projects without thinking it all the way through (for risk of talking myself all the way out in the process).
But even I know while I’m not in my studio every day, finding time for painting every day for 100 days isn’t realistic. I listened to my inner adult, and together we came up with a plan:
My 100 day project is to paint as often as I can, and post an update every day for 100 days.
To make that possible and prepare I let these paintings take over a long weekend at the start of the month in order to get ahead.
(Best. Weekend. Ever!)
If you haven’t seen the posts, I’ve been time-lapsing the process to share on Instagram.
This filming shrinks down the rate of progress to just 10%, making a half hour of painting flash by in 30 seconds! It’s fascinating to watch it back, to literally watch over my own shoulder as I paint. I follow my instincts and don’t plan what I’ll paint, so the images evolve out of nowhere, and then recede back under the newer layers.
Today we reached the quarter way mark, day 25.
To celebrate I’ve joined up the videos of the first layers of the first canvas I began working on. It’s still a work in progress, but already it’s been through so many evolutions.
I’ll be making little videos like these for all 5 paintings as I go along.
If you’d like an exclusive preview of these, and other things I’m making, join up for my email newsletters. At the time of typing, they go out just once or twice a month, so I won’t be flooding our inbox!
For reals!
I was telling you yesterpost how I came to pick my project, how I’m exploring beyond my usual painting boundaries.
I’m going to make a series of multi-layered paintings and time lapse the process, so there will be videos and photos to share.
Plus all the other layers: the ones that aren’t the actual paint and paper:
It’s going to be epic, folks!
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The edge of the fold.
The home of contention and conjecture,
Not either or but both and.
It’s just where the horizon touches.
The in-between is the place I love most.
The transient, the liminal,
The dusk and the dawn.
The turning of one into the next,
The edge of the fold.
The place of contention, conjecture,
Not either. Both.
The place where the horizon touches.
The moment in between.
The pause.
Fuelling the feud against the resolute absolute, the tightly defined.
Why are we still doing that anyway?
When instead we could butterfly between the two,
Share the energy,
Dance in the gap in between.
The illustrations in this post come from my 2018 Sketchbook Project book which is so nearly done! I’ll show you the finished book very soon!
If you’d like to be first to know what I’m working on, plus get exclusive offers on the things I make, clickety-hop aboard my email list right here.
Your email is utterly safe to me. I will send it words and pictures a couple of times each month unless you ask me to stop. That’s all.
Stories that emerge from pictures are in my mind today. Not the literal ones, but the ones that appear without words.
The stories that emerge from pictures are what’s forefront in my mind today. Not the illustrations of literal stories, I’m thinking about the ones that appear without words.
Untold, but there to be found. Waiting to be noticed, to be overheard.
Idling in my sketchbooks.
I keep seeing the same metaphors in what I draw and what I photograph: it’s all about perspective, the angle, the view.
Softened edges, a change of light.
Stop for a minute and just watch…
Where do you most notice the unspoken stories in the world around you?
If you’d like to be first to know what I’m working on, plus get exclusive offers on the things I make, clickety-hop aboard my email list right here.
(and I’ll send you my ebook A Year full of Color as a thank you for joining)
Your email is utterly safe to me. It will be wrapped up snug and nestled with a hot water bottle & a kitten until the spring arrives.
Happy Valentines X
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