abstract art – Page 10 – Mixy's Art Blog

reinvention

My first lesson in silk screen printing at college (a few years ago now) had us making monochrome collages to transfer to screens.

I recently updated my fav image I made for this project, and even after all this time, I love it still. This was one of those precious times when the muse was with me and together we generated something I really don’t tire of looking at.

If you read my post on digital editing you’ll recognise it as the image I used to demonstrate the technique.

Here it is full size. counterbalance_penngregory_s

If you love it like I do you might be interested to know you can get a print here, or find it printed on a T-shirt, or a cushion, or a bunch of other stuff

Pixel Pushing

A while back I was remembering an episode in my life when indulging in messy painty art just wasn’t practical. Limited by space constraints, impeded by my environment – a short term let in a flat with a brand new carpet.

This coincided with the opportunity to teach myself to Photoshop. Digital cameras were still quite new. It feels like a thousand years ago compared with the ease of tech we can enjoy now.

I took to pixel-pushing immediately. What I thought was just a temporary work around became a big part of my world. An all engulfing passion.

Some years later when I went on to fulfill the life long ambition of becoming a proper full time art student, and I threw myself back into all the real tangible visceral creativity that comes from paint and ink and clay and the such.

Contrast. It’s how I thrive. When I’m feeling flat and lacklustre I know I need to turn direction and play somewhere else for a while.

Just lately I was recombobulating my website, and in doing so I got back into photoshopping together some imagery. It’s been like spending time with a very dear old friend.

Now I’m nourishing my spirit by reinventing some of my doodles and paint sploshings in the realms of the crisply clean vector curves and the hazy glow of a Gaussian blur.

I’ve set myself some new challenges which I’ll show you soon. Meanwhile here are a handful of my favorites from a while ago…

Dawn Daisies II

Digital Pondlife

Abstraction

Aquascape

Vector Cats

(Prints of all of the above, plus lots more, are available from my shops on DeviantArt & RedBubble.)

bimbling through (47/52)

week 47. Here we are: picked up the pace this week, bimbling through, I’ve made it back to real-time!

red-blue (45/52)

Still playing catch up : I’m just a few pages from bringing you up to where I am in the book now!

This week’s collage fodder includes some ex-pages from a gridded notebook, and a recycled envelope with a pleasingly matching tiny-gridded inside pattern.

Coloring in the squares makes a tranquil meditationy pass-time. Time to brain-idle for a bit. Coloring in the bitty little envelope-innards squares was more of a tiny dot technique that was less restful, and less pursued.

Color-wise I’ve got a big Red/Blue thing going on a lot in my life. Season of contrast – I want to balance out all that muted wintery grey and fog.

Edit: I just noticed this: the poppies! That was a subconscious thing I didn’t register at the time. I actually had to look back and check the week this was, and yes, it was the week with remembrance day.

This week I’m mostly wearing red & blue. (Did I tell you I have blue hair right now. This color obsession has literally gone to my head!)

a nest of nests (44/52)

As this week progressed I was listening to the audio book version of Tim Ferriss’ 4 hour work week.

His finely tuned systematized out-sourcing structure is a few bounds further than I will stretch, but I’m finding workable elements to feel more productive before they even manifest out of the theoretical.

One rule is ‘Don’t multi-task’

This is a truth I already get.

It’s just a way to do more than one thing simultaneously, less efficiently, with added confusion, and slower. And don’t get me started on all the associated women vs men BS.)

I totally get the point of not multi-tasking

So being reminded made me smile…

…as I witnessed my self simultaneously fail at several tasks, as my inner rebel will neither listen to her own advice, nor that of the instruction she’s currently agreeing with.

I mean – the whole audio book thing – is surely a vehicle to enable the doing of too many things at once.

Sure I can read an actual book, I’d enjoy that. Oooh, but what if I could distractedly miss chunks of the content while concurrently doing just a few other things….

Y’know, so long as you can appreciate the irony, and it makes you smile.

On the theme of streamlining efficiency, being less time-wasteful. Bullet-journaling has bobbed up on my horizon a few times.

I’m a long time journaler, diary writer, and exhaustive lister. It’s the best kinda brain-dump, and as a bonus I love to read over the thoughts of a previous me, comparing a today from another year, another era.

I’m drawn toward bullet-journaling cos I find so many notes and lists are repeated in fragmented form over years. I can round them all up in one book, once and for all. Resisting beginning with a list of lists, this looks like it could be a solution.

From the start of December I’m going to utilize a variation on this system. At the time of writing, I have over a week before it begins for proper, but I’ve already acquired a new notebook, noted some notes, listed some lists.

I’ll let you know how it pans out.

another wave of chaos (43/52)

Each week I complete another page of this book, each page is similar but distinctly individual, echoing the shape each week takes.

More often than not I’ll be listening to the radio, a podcast, or someone speaking to me from the internet. And the words that resonate loudest often find their way into the page. This week the words came (again) from Bashar

“… the key to riding the wave of chaos
is not to resist it
but to allow yourself to know
you are a part of the energy of chaos.
To allow yourself to be chaos
and in becoming chaos
and allowing a new form of organization in,
rather than imposing your old system of organization upon it,
by letting this new idea in
and, as you say, riding it,
going with it,
not resisting it.
you will then, by becoming chaos,
allow the chaotic action
to show you through sychronicity,
what it is you really need to be aware of,
how it is that life will organize itself
using you as a guide post.”

Courage, Faith, Trust. 33/52

Scribbled things. Filled in with nonsense and part heard words

Dabs, daubs, splosh. Dragged, drawn out, drawn on.

And more, and further. Anemones? meteors? Some frenzied chaos. (I honestly don’t know.)

But as usual, I like the details best of all

The title for this week – Courage, Faith, Trust – came from the same-named scrap of paper that got itself collaged into the frenzy. (it appeared a week early, as it’s numbered 34) but it also calls up the essence of this practice. Courage, Faith and Trust in the process:

Keep showing up, don’t plan, don’t expect, just keep doing and making and going. And all will be well.

See the face? 29/52

Close up, week 29 looked like this…

A lot of layers, a lot of buried words. A lot of rich, warm colour

Did you see the face?

reflecting ‘so much more’ 27/52

Every week I create something.

Some weeks I create more.

In fact – most days I create loads – but in terms of the tangible, the painty reality, every week of this year I am creating at least one something: One page of One book of One year

I’m over half way in now, and I’m detecting more and more patterns all the time, every one a metaphor for the unfolding times in which they’re made:

Some weeks start on the first day and incrementally develop a little at a time.
Some weeks are a flurry of fervour, forced into focus in a short few days: blurting out in totality at the start, or squished up against the finishing hours.

They all reflect some underlying aspects, some current cares and the modality of the moment:
Words and feelings ooze in and out.. You might not hear them, but we both know they are there.

Weaving in the elements: internal and external.

There’s what rests on the surface, and there’s so much more.

The surface reflects to you what you project out.
For everyone it’s something personal and new.

Each page, each week, each is contained within a season of interest with the cast of supporting characters who meander about and around my days. These recent weeks have been populated by some images that I printed more than I needed for a project I’ve since finished. Smiling, familiar faces from within the framework that structures these times. Left over faces smile out of these times.

Here from the perspective of a photo I see all that I’d like to do to ‘finish’ the image. But that week has passed so it’s another that I’ll leave as it is, almost ready, a little soft in the middle and a bit raw in places. It’s all ok.
Time pushes on, I’m over the other side of this one now.

digital art – rewind

In a recent post I was telling you about my early beginnings in digital art.

But guess what – turns out there was earlier stuff that I’d totally forgotten about! Pre-dating that by a good couple of years ago or so, there was stuff like this.

This is like rooting through the loft space of my past, ideas and experiments I packed away in the back of my mind and old hard drives.

I look back and remember vividly the delight of discovery in this myriad of new possibility. There was no limit in my mind as to what could be spun out of this magic.

OF everything I made in these early days, this is the one I loved the most.

I called it Fireglass, and I was entranced and enchanted by this little image.

But that was the thing I suddenly came to realise – this was such a little image.

Such a very little image.

At the point I made it – which was by some mental abberation of a puppy in exuberant scampering mode, delirious in uncharted territory so of course I couldn’t accurately back track that one – and I had no grasp of pixel size.

No idea at all that the resolution at which this freakishly gorgeous little gem arrived on my screen meant it would print out at not much more than 1 inch square.

And even then not at especially sharp quality.

This little glowing rectangle of orangy red joy was what really kicked me into the next level: from play and unchanneled driftless clicking, now I wanted to take control over this alchemy. I went from careering about unchallenged by anything to navigating my way toward a more deliberate composition.

I was embarking on a massive adventure.