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You’ll get an email to confirm you signed up and are human. Sorry, only humans (and their cats) can join. Check your spam folder cos sometimes the good stuff gets swept in there by mistake. Also check with your cat.
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You’ll get an email to confirm you signed up and are human. Sorry, only humans (and their cats) can join. Check your spam folder cos sometimes the good stuff gets swept in there by mistake. Also check with your cat.
In July 2020 I began this enormous sketchbook, with a new double page spread every week. I posted a few flip throughs in the first year, and although the project is still merrily trotting along at a spread a week, I fell out of the habit of posting updates.
Today I set myself the task to root about behind the metaphorical sofa in my mind and show you some of what’s been going on in my world of art making. Beginning with a flip through of the enormous sketchbook.
This brings us to page 73, although in real time I’ve already clocked up >100 pages, so I’ve more to show you yet. *Watch this space!*
On top of this, it’s been a reeeallly long time since I posted a studio musings newsletter, apologies for radio silence, this is on the list to be revived in the next few days!
Hi – I’m Mixy!
This is Mixy 🙂
I’m a mixed media & textile artist from London, UK.
I love to share what I’m making, and I hope it brings some inspiration to your creative time.
You can see what I’m making on this blog, and in these places too
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You’ll get an email to confirm you signed up and are human. Sorry, only humans (and their cats) can join. Check your spam folder cos sometimes the good stuff gets swept in there by mistake. Also check with your cat.
I had this little sketchbook and just a few colors. As I noticed the repeating patterns around me I began to play, when I got home I continued to fill up this little book with more variations.
I explored a similar idea before, but now I want to carry it on further – with simpler forms – maybe a circle or a square – maybe in just one color – just to see what’s possible.
If you’d like to see more ideas like this and find out what’s been inspiring me, sign up for my monthly studio musings newsletter here.
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You’ll get a confirmation email when you sign up (check you junk mail folder – cos sometimes the good stuff gets swept away by mistake). I’ll pop into your inbox about once a month with news on what I’m up to in my colorful little corner of the universe and what’s been inspiring me.
Who are we and what are we doing here? The questions whose ideas of answers are held together with the phrase “In other words.”
The art we surround ourselves with, the music we listen to, the stories that provide our diversions: these make up the food that sustains our own creative bug.
some of the ingredients for my imagination
From stitching beads onto painted fabric and dyed papers – collaging these into books and onto objects, I get proper giddy excited thinking about new combinations of media.
Right now I’ve got a yearning to add more elements into the art I’m involved in making. More aspects, more facets.
“In Other Words”
A few years ago I made an installation with a crazy big drawing on a roll of paper that was suspended from wall to floor like a waterfall.
The drawing was made from the transcript of a sound collage which played along with an animation, projected on the wall behind. Yes. It was a lot going on!
You can see the video element of the piece called “In Other Words” here
yes, this is my actual eye!
So here’s the thing:
I want to make something big and exciting & I’d love you to join in!
I’ll tell you more about my thoughts in this month’s newsletter{which goes out tomorrow}
If you haven’t already signed up for my newsletter, you can do so right here. I’ll drop into your inbox just about once a month with juicy news on my studio doings + the all the current things that inspire these ideas. Come join me!!
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“The thoughts we choose to think
are the tools we use to paint the canvas of our lives.” – Louse Hay
2018’s been a soupy sort of year, it feels like all the days and weeks swirled up together, undefined and drifty. It’s fun to go back and look at these memories I caught as they floated by. It feels like a reset: Ready to begin again.
New year: new art journal. Finding connections, exploring rabbit-holes.
“What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.”
Gustav Klimt in Paris, piles of pebbles in Cyprus. Shavasana.
“Just for now,without asking how, let yourself sink into stillness. … Just for now, be boundless, free, with awakened energy tingling in your hands and feet. Drink in the possibility of being who and what you really are – so fully alive that the world looks different, newly born and vibrant, just for now..”
Where do you find your inspiration? how do you stretch your creativity to include new patterns and shapes?
While I took a long pause from painting and drawing through the summer, seems maybe my muse melted in the heatwave, I was all out of inspiration for weeks. Instead I turned my attention to sewing and spent my spare time adding to this ongoing project .
Then, as suddenly as the ideas had dried up, they began to repopulate my thoughts.
The pages are beginning like usual, with splashes and washes of color from messy brush wipes, patches of color to use up left over paint.
BUT, the next step is the new part: every page is has space for drawing something I’ve beeninspired by.
So often I take photos of patterns and shapes, so often I save images from artists and designers.
All the things that light up my imagination and set off a new train of doodles.
So I’ve got an enormous catalogue of inspiration tucked away in my phone, my bookmarks & favs.
When I get a spare few minutes, or when I want to warm up my drawing brain, I go to my art journal to add drawings and doodles inspired by someone or something in my list.
I was fascinated by the shapes and lines of these rocks on the beach in Cyprus last month. Dozens of photos of these wonderful wobbly lines. This is the first of a series they inspired.
Meanwhile, other artists have been drip-feeding ideas into my mind too. I invite their influence to stretch my skills, to let their style add new aspects to the way I doodle.
Alisa Burke creates fabulous flowery mandalas and often shares her process in Instagram. It’s such a meditative process, watching the patterns unfurl onto the page.
This is the first of my inspired by Alisa spreads.
art journal spread inspired by Alisa Burke
Where do you find your inspiration? how do you stretch your creativity to include new patterns and shapes?
If you’d like to be first to see what I’m making & doing, hop onto my email list here:
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.
Your email is quite safe with me.I will not trade it for magic beans. I promise.
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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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.
Mixy's Art Blog 