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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Flashback Sale! Heads up folks!
You can save $21 on 21 SECRETS 14-16 November. Get art journal inspiration and share the fun with the 21 Secrets online community
Use the coupon code FLASHBACK at checkout
for $21 off any of these 21 SECRETS editions.
Every edition of 21 Secrets contains a feast of ideas, new techniques for art journaling and secret tips & tricks from a diverse and talented team of teachers.
You’ll receive a downloadable eBook containing 25+ hours of videos and 150+ pages of full color photos, templates, and detailed clear instructions.
You’ll have instant, unlimited access to the material and classes, yours to download and keep forever. And bundles of support and love from the 21 Secrets online community.
“Art Journaling will lead you home to yourself. It will soften your fears and turn your insecurities into jewels. It will heal your heart and help you build a deeper relationship with your Truth. Art journaling is a catalyst for joy, creativity and peace.”
Connie Solera, Dirty Footprints Studio
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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:
In my latest newsletter (going out later today) I share more about getting through un-creativity; what’s on the horizon for my next projects. And my latest flip-though video.
If you haven’t already, hop aboard the news-list here 🙂
Gradually I’m recombobulating after an unplanned summer-long sabbatical.
It all began with slipping away from social media, from blogging, and from the digital mayhem of click-baity distraction.
Then it spilled over into my creative practice, as I set down one project after another, anything creative that felt more should do than a giddy-excited-to-play.
It was the accumulated exhaustion of someone who’s spent a life time rushing and bustling and keeping too may plans spinning. Driven by poorly reasoned logic, no time to question my motives.
The only kind of making that lit up my heart was sewing, so that’s what I did, day after day, until the lull passed.
This is a wall hanging I began making years ago. On and off I’ll pick it up, spend my spare time stitching away, then it goes back in a box and sits for a while longer.
This was the only creative outlet that’s sparked anything in my soul of late.
Then, as suddenly as all the ideas dried up, one at a time, they began to sneak back.
Beginning with some new textile projects and spilling into a bundle of new art journal/sketchbook ideas, it feels like that part of me that thrives on making and doing has come back to life. As the un-hibernation process is picking up momentum, one idea is feeding into the next. I’m feeling more like me again.
art journal spread inspired by Alisa Burke
A little bit of what’s on my creative horizon!
In my latest newsletter (going out later today) I share more about getting through these lumpy few weeks of un-creativity; what’s on the horizon for my next projects. And you can be first to see my latest flip-though video of the project that set off all that’s going on now. Yay!
If you haven’t already, hop aboard the news-list here
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.
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 storeand 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
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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.
Look at that paper curl! I appear to have angered the book now.
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.
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 “Wandering Doodle” as I called it, best seen like this, photoshopped together, it carries a line of wiggles and squiggles throughout the book.
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.
You might remember my first ‘best laid’ plans
Mixy's Art Blog 