Yesterpost I showed you the first of three chapters of my book. So without any further fussing, here’s the next one.
Tag: Mixed Media
almost completely (50/52)
Every week this year I’ve worked on one page of this art journal.
There’s a poignancy to the last pages of a book, a wanting to eke out the fun….
mixed with a readiness to move on to new projects.
Oh so many new projects lined up!
This is an almost complete page of the almost complete book….
We’re so close to the end now I’m going to save the completed page until I can show you the whole book at once 🙂
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jumping across
I’m not rushing or hustling the old year out, I’m not one to wish my days away, but I am dipping newest thoughts into next month already.
Next month – Next year – Next incarnation of being me in this life.
While I’m indifferent to the big new years fuss that happens around midnight on 31 December, I do love the clean freshness of 1 January every time it comes round.
So much so, I don’t want to guzzle it all in one day, I want to savour it.
My routine, such that it’s becoming, begins toward the end of November and by Winter Solstice it’s up to full speed. Those last 10 days of the year represent the closing up of the old year. Loose ends neatly bundled, filed under the past.
As 2015’s page a week book winds up I’m already sewing the seeds for 2016’s year-sized art challenge.
To kick off I’m going to take on Belinda Fireman’s #selflove365 adventure of a daily 1″ square drawing.
I bought a concertina sketch book way back – I think with the intention to take it away on a trip – but either it didn’t go with me, or I didn’t find the time to fill the pages. Either way, it’s fresh and ripe and raw!
It’s already ready to be 2016-ed!
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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.)
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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!
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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!)
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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.
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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.”
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Contrast and Agreements (42/52)
Sometime earlier this year I fell upon the Four Agreements (Miguel Ruiz). This week they fell back into my mind, so I caught them here on the page. If you don’t know them,
The Four Agreements are:
1. Be Impeccable with your Word: Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the Word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your Word in the direction of truth and love.
2. Don’t Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
3. Don’t Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret.
I remind myself of these to keep on track. Again and again. There’s something magical about the physical act of writing words. I think the process is wired up to a special section of the brain that remembers differently.
There’s a lot about contrast. By which I mean to say – everywhere – it’s all about contrast, isn’t it? And on a smaller scale too.. Yester-page saw the words shouting out unhindered by art. This page is the opposite as from almost the outset the wordage got drowned out by heavy paint.
But it’s ok, I know what I wrote. The words are still fresh in my mind and readily retrievable from this bountiful online repository of stuff.
This page saw me in the mood for change. Random artifacts. Desk findings.
Moleskine users will recognise this addition (I never had cause to use these stickers – or these others that turned up a recent tidying flurry – but as somehow-un-throw-out-ables, there’s quite a collection to use up now)
It’s been a few pages since I played with the paints. So that was the spark to the first layer of word covering.
But…oh…
too dark.
Bring contrast: Add white
splurged on white
Thick dollopy white – oh THE PATTERNS!
OH MY DAYS!
But…..
Now too much white?
glimpses survive, but … more color to balance that white…
Like the proverbial kid in the sweet shop, or the bull in the china shop, I am the loon with the oil pastels, making the lumps and rhythms in the white paint come to life in all the colours of autumn that my eyes have been unconsciously soaking in.
Not usually a fav medium to me, I’m just developing a fondness for the slightly icky messiness involved.
And yet again, while the page (week) has a certain overall heaviness (ugliness)
that I didn’t have time to remedy,
the details (moments) hold the beauty.
Sanctuary in Now 37/52
It’s been all this time since I posted. Cos I’ve been away.
But I’ve kept the book of weekly pages running, and so here we are with the page from the week before last.
Somewhere nice? Nah, it wasn’t that sort of away.
I didn’t leave the place, I just left the usual. I left the ordinary responsibilities of being me.
Time away to recombobulate.
I’ve been hiding out here in a sanctuary of colors.
Lost in time and lost in patterns.
And between you and me, I still haven’t gone back.
And between you and me, I’m not sure if I will.
Thing is, I’m just realising now as I explain my days to you, I’m making sense of it as I go along.
The reason I find so much warm comfort in these simple scribbles, blocks and lumps of colour…
As a kid I loved – more than almost anything – the simple pleasure of colouring in. It was as a meditative process then as it is now.
The only time I’ve had an out of body experience was sitting cross legged on my bed, aged about 9 or so, colouring in. I remember it like it was yesterday. My train of thoughts had wandered away from me and as I tried to back-track a mantra began to form in my head “what was it I was just thinking about – what was it I was just thinking about – what was it….’ then WHOOOSH I was somewhere up above looking down at this little girl sitting cross legged on my bed, colouring in.
In the moment I recognised that as me and had time to think Wow! and then How do I get back down? I was back.
I wanted to do it again. And I didn’t. But I did. Not for the first time I was utterly freaked.
So the part of my consciousness that heard How do I get back down? and set me back in my body, prevented me from trying (properly) again.
I carried on colouring.
So I’ve rediscovered this simple joy again as I’ve found myself still wanting to escape the real world in the way I did then as a little girl. I think the magic of getting lost in these colours is amplified by the knowledge that if I wanted to I could probably re-conjure that state again.
I’m soothed by the process, but I’m not looking to disappear now. I spent way to much life in escapism, I inherited traits and tricks that I see now didn’t serve me so well. I’m unpicking that past one bit at a time. Facing up to some ghosts.
Circumstances have set themselves out in front of me in a way I can’t ignore any more. This time I’m stepping up instead.
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