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.
I’ve worked my socks off to make this as fabulous & fun as I can, I’m really proud how it’s come together. So much so, if you don’t think you’re getting value for money by the end of the first segment, you can have your money back.
Just £97 for a whole year of color (or 3 instalments of £33)
I’ve worked my socks off to make this program as fabulous and fun as I can, and I’m really proud of how it’s come together.
So much so, if you don’t think you’re getting value for money by the end of the first color segment, you can have your money back in full without a single quibble. Srsly, not even a little one!!
Join me and a group of wonderful creative spirits to share this adventure in color ——-Y’know over half of the 2017 group are returning for a second trip around the color wheel (some signed up before we’d even finished last year!)
I’ve even reduced the price, to make it accessible for everyone there’s the option to pay in 3 instalments.
This is my Inktober inspired Sketchbook Project for Twelvty 2018: Three ideas smooshed together between the covers of a 5 x 7 inch book which will be the springboard into a new adventure for next year.
……..this is a story that began in July……..
Part One: The Sketchbook Project
The Sketchbook Projectis just as the name suggests. It’s a collaborative art project, and it’s enormous. It’s 36,130 artists’ books contributed by creative people from 135+ countries over 11 years. In 2018it will contain at least one more, and that will bemy one.
My book arrived in the mail on Monday 31 July, straight away I set to work on doodling a first page with my initial thoughts and ideas:
Contented that I’d made my first mark, I set the book aside while I waited for the ideas to formulate. Then I got sick, and was away from my life for a while. The up-side to hospital-strength pain relief is that although I wasn’t able to create anything for a while, the visual ideas flooding my brain were far beyond what my usual imagination can conjure, and I’ve still got a solid grasp on what I saw inside my head.
Yes, they were colourful. (more on that in part three).
………. now let’s fast forward to September……….
Part two: Inktober
Inktober is an annual ink drawing challenge held online every October. Again, the clue is in the title.
I was dithering as to whether I’d participate this year, historically I’ve been rubbish at commitment. Is this a good reason not to play along? That’s what I was pondering on n off through September.
Until I hit upon the way my three ideas perfectly fit together.
Ink drawings are the scaffolding for the content of my sketchbook project – the top layer of which I’ll explain in part three – combining to make real what my muddled little opiated brain saw in hospital. And leading me into a project I’m planning for 2018!
“OHMYGOSH IT’S LOOKING A LOT LIKE A PLAN OF ACTION”
…………. now fast forward to October 1st……..
Today began page one of the sketchbook, #inktober doodle number one, a commentary on my thought process as the project reveals itself to me. It’s all quite meta.
Black and white drawings are all well and good, as they form the scaffolding for the content of my sketchbook, but in order for it to be ‘me’ it needs some color, right? Of course it does.
……. Which brings me to ……
Part three: TWELVTY 2018
“Twelvty“ is the environment in which almost all my art has evolved this year: With each month a new color – as conveniently there are 12 colors in the color wheel if you count the tertiaries (which are by far my favs) – this perfectly fits one year.
complementary colors: opposites in the color wheel
An aspect of this color wheel journey I’ve enjoyed exploring more deeply this year is the ways that each color fits in amid its neighbours; how they interact. How they dance.
I’ve developed a real fascination with balancing the pairs and groups of colors – the complementaries, the triadic groups…
This is something I intend to explore more thoroughly in a second variation of Twelvty in 2018.
This is also the way I plan to add color to the Inktober doodlings in the sketchbook project book.
The Plan:
So there we have it: The doodles and drawings of Inktober will form the structure of my vision for the sketchbook.
In November I’ll add the colours, which will be the pairs and threesomes of color theory illustrating the beauty of the color wheel.
This in turn will be the visualisation of a new program all about color balancing for the new year.
YIKES!
I’ll tell you more about these 2018 incarnations of Twelvty at a future date. Meanwhile I’ve got important doodles to do!
Be sure to get on my mailing list if you’re even a little bit interested in finding out more about TWELVTY 2018 cos there’ll be special deals for folks on my list!
Y’now I’ve been immersed in color for the last few months. Not my usual multi-colored chaos (although there’s no escaping that) – but a very specific niche of color – as I explore and examine the color wheel.
It’s a project I played with a few years ago keeps returning to in one way or another.
It keeps coming back. It’s a compulsion.
But this time is a little different: this time I’m joined by other artists and creatives, and we’re on this adventure together. And I’m totally loving it!
We began the year in shades of sunshine & lemon with YELLOW, and now in the second month we’ve stepped round to the luscious lime and sumptuous olive tones that fall into YELLOW-GREEN. Next month we explore GREEN… so on, cycling around the color wheel, a month at a time.
The thing is,since I decided to share this color journey, it’s taken on a momentum and is developing a character of its own. (As big projects so often do).
As I plan forward into the upcoming months of colors I see this adventure develop into one big ongoing story, rather than the 12 little self-contained, single-color tales I first envisaged. I anticipated TWELVTY being the kind of course folks to hop on board any time through the year, with instant access to all the material to date.
…..But 6 or so weeks in, TWELVTY has become something much bigger than I realised it would be, and that simply isn’t the way it’s decided to grow.
So I’ve made a decision.
Which I’ll tell you about on Friday.(Because Friday is special)
Want to find out more about what’s in TWELVTY – it’s all over here . I also did a big ole Q&A postover here. Or ask me in the comments – I’m massively excited about this – ask me anything! (anything about TWELVTY…I don’t have answers to much else!)
Hop on my mailing list here to get irregular updates on my colorful makings & doings direct to your inbox.
(and as a welcome, you get this little ebook all about color when you join)
Depending on the hemisphere you call home, today is either the shortest or longest day of the year. I like to set aside some time this week to set intentions and bundle up any loose ends so these last days of December are a gradual transition into the new year.
This year I’m super busy combobulating things in readiness for the start of TWELVTY in just a little over a week! I’m so excited!! And to celebrate the holidays, I’ve made you a little gift!
a delightfully illustrated, hand-crafted ebook all about color. Just for you!
This ebook is all yours when you join my newsletter for irregular (once or twice a month usually) updates on my doings & makings.
Be well, my friends, Much love to you all X
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(Your email is absolutely safe with me, I’ll just pop by and check up on it time to time, feed it biscuits, plump up its cushions, that sort of thing.)
I was in London all day Saturday. A rainy grey day, the view from our second floor window crossed over a patch of garden to the grey stonework and concrete of the buildings opposite. These short December days barely get light and the wet and wind dulled out any colours.
The only life on view from up here was a solitary grey squirrel scampering along the spindly limbs of the near naked tree-tops.
But amid the gloom was the last remaining brightness of the season: with every gust of wind a few remaining golden yellow leaves danced about, tumbling, sprinkling, shining.
I was transfixed.
My mind is full of color, it is my ‘thing’.
And as I’m focussed on yellow in the prepration of the first chapter of TWELVTY I suppose it’s no wonder I was so captivated. But it made me ask myself if that’s why: would I have noticed so keenly? Would I have seen it in such glory?Would it have held that measure of magic?
I have no control group of me, no comparison, so these questions are unanswerable
But I have come to observe that the more I actively look, the more I absorb, and the richer my life becomes. When there’s so much enjoyment available from the everyday and mundane, life is lusher and days are fuller.
I’m so full of ideas for TWELVTY, I’m almost bursting! so much so I’m waking up in the night and having to write stuff down. I’m literally dreaming about it! It’s filling all the corners of my mind.
The program begins in the new year with shiny bright yellow so I’ve been warming up my drawing-and-painting-in-just-yellow vibes in readiness.
I love to use just one color(I love using ALL THE COLORS!) but one-at-a-time has a really special quality. This is one of the big things that I want to share and explore further with you.
I’m putting together a Q&A
If you want to know more about what TWELVTY’s all about comment below to let me know 🙂
What would you like to know?
What would you like to learn?
What really lights you up about some colours, and not others?
Y’now I’ve been immersed in color for the last few months. Not my usual multi-colored chaos (although there’s no escaping that) – but a very specific niche of color – as I explore and examine the color wheel.
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