digital art – Mixy's Art Blog

10th anniversary Tree of Life

Yesterpost I was showing you the Tree of Life, the drawing that’s been with me for (still finding this bit hard to believe) ten years.

I’ve photoshopped it through a few variations over this time, and to celebrate it’s tenth birthday I decided to reinvent one more incarnation for 2017.

More vivid, more zingy, the colors are almost an inverse of the one I showed you yesterday. Here they are together side by side.

TOL2017small TOLfullcolor

I’m fascinated by how the mood shifts with the colors.

The underwater-y-ness is amped up with the sharper blues. I like the way that once again it’s completed a circle, as the beginning drawing was in shades of blue, and here we are back in this side of the spectrum.

Here she is in some little detail pieces…

Tree of Life 2017: detail

So that the new version isn’t lonely (yes, that is a thing with drawings, didn’t you know?) it’s joined by a newly spruced up version of the original drawing, so a bluer blue version is out there too.

All three trees of life are all available a prints in Society6

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tree of life

Life often moves in a spiral motion: I’ve been here before, haven’t you?

The view is a little bit different through today’s lens but what I see looks distinctly familiar.

It feels like no time passed, in so many senses, but the numbers tell me it’s approaching 10 years since I drew this.

I remember so vividly, when this drawing came through me. (Not to me, most definitely through me)

Have you had this happen too?

I had the strongest sense of just being a vehicle through which this drawing wanted to be made real. It could have been anyone.

Of everything I’ve ever drawn, I’ve felt the least able to claim this as ‘mine’. If anything, I am its.

I remember the day it happened, I remember the big pad of watercolor paper, the watercolor pencils and paints, the frenzy of leaves and curves and wispy bits.

I remember watching it happen in front of me: Connected, and separate. Both at once.

The drawing had its own spirit, and was not willing to stay on paper.

It wanted to grow, to have more color, more depth, more vibrancy. What It had me draw was only a skeleton.

it demanded scanning and tinkering, new layers of color, new detail.

Even all these years later, through it’s many incarnations and variations, it’s the most loved of all my drawings.

It’s me, and it isn’t me.

It’s an enigma.

It is, Tree of Life.

To celebrate 10 years of Tree of Life I’ve adapted it for printables, so it can manifest itself around the world.

Would you like to give this drawing a space in your world? It’s available from Society6 in many shapes and forms.

Art prints in many sizes, framed or unframed

Notebooks for musings & doodles, lists & lyrics, poems & plans. Cases, covers & skins for phones/ ipods. Totes & zippy pouches for carrying important things around in! And more!

tree-of-life352901-carry-all-pouches (1)

All these & more can be found at: society6.com/mixy

If you like this, and things like this, you can get sporadic updates on my thoughts and drawings delivered right to your inbox. Hop onto my email list right here.

<a href="https://mixygecko.wufoo.com/forms/z1pfxfus0jq7ftl/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Fill out my Wufoo form!</a>

(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. I will ensure it is guarded at all times by dragons. Hungry dragons.

wandering mind

Cooking dinner one evening last week, waiting for the pot to boil:

The condensation forming on the lid was developing into this fabulous leopardskin effect. Too good to miss. I love the ephemeral beauty in the everyday. It’s everywhere, once you start to look.

So I took this photo and shared it on social media in the circles who see abstract art more than the crazed doings of some weirdo who takes photos of her dinner before it’s even made 😉

And it made me think.

How far can I chase this one idea?
Where could it go?
How far can it evolve?

So today (following the theme – waiting for dinner to cook) I tweaked the colour a bit and printed it out.

And then I began to play: Doodles, re-photographed… leopard spots are evolving into seashells…

more doodles, different camera angle, slight colour tweaks…

more doodles, new camera angle, colours inverted…. I love the way the pen lines seem to sit on top of the photo, they’re in a different dimension of contrast.

Or shape shift: add dimension with concertina folds and photographed from every which way.

I’m sure given more time I could play with light and shadows for more drama. You get the idea, the possibilities go on… I hope this might spark some ideas for you too.

take 5: episode 1, at a crossroads

I was telling you yester-post how I’d reached a crossroads in my reimaginings. Here’s the thing:

A thing with which you’ll be familiar if the kind of art you make has the option to re-wind time….

Merrily trotting along to a certain point and Save;
Turn down a figurative side road,
Do more stuff,
Have an adventure.

….And also

Be back at that same junction,
and go a different route,
and have a different adventure – with a whole new cast of characters – and a uniquely new plot.

It’s like choosing between the many-worlds of quantum mechanics.

Now that I’ve dwelt on this a little while I like the idea of a Repeating Five-ness by making each episode of Take Five venture off in Five wildly different outcomes. Yay! Five times the fun!

But I digress. That comes after this:

This is where I’d value your opinion.

I know you’ll understand, as an artist, the hardest part is recognising that final tweak before you call a job jobbed and comfortably move on. Leaving it be. (I thought I was there.)

I really did.

The last change – IDK – do I like V1 or V2? I like them both. Which do I like more? The more I look, the less I know.

So it’s over to you guys…

Version 1:

take5_01smaller

Version 2:

take5_02small

…and a bit of detail from both. Just in case that helps any.

take5_01detail take5_02detail

Please help me choose before monkey-mind talks me into looking for versions 3 through 48. (She’s very persuasive…!)

TIA lovely ppl X

take 5: episode 1

Y’know how I’ve been revisiting my digital art? I’ve also been rooting through my online galleries. Some of those pieces date back almost a decade, and some still hold up well. But some were looking a bit tired, a bit shabby, or just plain meh. So I archived them away.

I’ve still got most of the images from which they were made, so over the next as-long-as-it-takes I plan to re-photoshop some of them into new works: Hybrids of old and new ideas. I love digital for many reasons – the ability to do this is a big one.

So you can guess the plan from the title, right?

I plan to Take Five images, and ~~frankenstein~~ re-imagine them together into a shiny new beautiful something.

These are the first Five contenders for the project.

photo of dull book page. Looks a bit mathy.

scanned doodled thing. Sea creature? Something abstractly multi-tentacled.

something a bit Celtic, and a bit unfinished. Watercolor and photoshop

sections of typed gibberish

a lovely gecko. (of course)

At the time of posting I’ve reached a crossroads in the making of the hybrid. I’ll explain later…

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.)

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.

thinking in digital

I got back into art after a long while away from it. Whilst ‘grown up life’ was busy occupying too much of my time and I pedantically stood in the way of where I wanted to be, I dwelt in a creative famine that lasted for too many years to recall.

The thing that brought me back to life was digital art: I acquired myself a computer with all kinds of glorious programs and bit by bit (ha!) I fathomed out how to make use of them. I began in Adobe Photoshop. And I fell in love with pixel pushing.

At this time I lived in a tiny one-room rented flat. Painting wasn’t viable: This carpet was new when I moved in, I paint messy, I can’t afford to lose the deposit.

Digital was my perfect solution.

The ‘desk’ where my computer was homed was a big shelf unit, with the tower on the floor, the ginormous CRT monitor on one shelf, the keyboard and mouse on a piece of board I perched on my lap.

Ideal?

No.

But I was entranced by the magic of what could be done, so comfort and ergonomics were very much secondary.

After all, this is where my soul belongs: in the midst of a multicoloured frenzy of streaming ideas and glory. I Stuff like this began happening…

And a short while, and on with the addition of digital camera, bits of ‘reality’ entered the mix.

I got massive value from the magazines that were about at the time – we’re looking back about 10-12 years ago now. All my spare money went on anything with Photoshop in the title.

I devoured the tutorials, I dabbled and played.

I was up all night on this stuff. A lot!

I got my collaging head on.

And I took my ideas with me down this rabbithole of dreamscape.

(I’ve been there ever since)

digtal fings

hey folks, hope you’re all keeping well n keeping warm!

"Circle of Life" doodles & photoshop — “Circle of Life” doodles & photoshop

I’ve just been looking through some pics from last year on my computer, and thought I’d share with you some of my digital doings.

digital collage - this looks familiar from somewhere..! — digital collage – this looks familiar from somewhere..!

For about 10 years, pretty much all the art I made was based in the digital world.

"Golden London", photos and doodles — “Golden London”, photos and doodles

Having a small space in which to play was the reason I got started like this – it’s pretty much impossible to make an actual mess – you can’t spill pixels on the carpet and get in trouble with the grown ups for a start!

"Abstraction" Photos n Photoshop — “Abstraction” Photos n Photoshop

I became entranced, as I learnt new skills I was seduced by the squillions of options, and I poured my spare hours into learning more and more.

"Digital Pond Life", doodles in photoshoppery — “Digital Pond Life”, doodles in photoshoppery

While I still enjoy a good dabble, the world of inks and paints and stained hands (and, ahem, carpets… shh don’t tell!) and all that has, for now, won my heart.

Who knows what comes next! 😀