If you follow my Instagrammings, you’ll have seen some cryptic posts about my *secret project*. It’s time to let the cat out of the bag…
This year’s entry to the Brooklyn Art Library’s sketchbook project is a little different.
During the COVID lockdowns one thing I’ve really missed is visiting art exhibitions and galleries, soaking up the inspiration, being surrounded by likeminded people.
So to mark this very strange part of history I’ve used painted papers and screen prints from my studio to create a tiny gallery of tiny paintings in the pages of this book.
I began by cutting small pieces from the papers I chose and developing the shapes and colours I had as a starting point to make each individual tiny painting.
They range in size between less than an inch to maybe 3 inches at the largest.
100 tiny paintings in progress
Naturally, the journey from start to finish took a few diversions on the way.
I considered stitching them into patchworked pages.
I like the effect of doing this, but went back to the ‘gallery’ idea. I’ll circle around to this idea another time.
Then my thoughts wandered to mandalas.
Could I make 100 tiny mandalas? …yes I could, but the deadline was looming so this is another idea on hold for another time. Meanwhile the ones I made are finding a home in my sketchbook for now.
Eventually I settled back on the original idea, and I just got it all done in time to mail it off to Brooklyn.
It will be part of the permanent collection after it’s arrived and been scanned, so you’ll be able to view it in real life or in their digitized library soon.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to watch a flip through with close ups of these weeny little pictures, be sure to catch my newsletter later this week.
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
These are the pages that have been brightening up my long dark days of winter. As we’ve reached the shortest day I’m calling this project finished and ready to move on to all that comes next. I can’t tell you how much fun I had with this book.
I fill these pages in the spare bits of time in between other things, so they become a visual stream of consciousness, garnished with bits of stuff, collaged scraps of whatever’s on my desk, they come to represent a snapshot of the season’s projects and ideas.
I scribble down words I hear in song lyrics, audio books and podcasts, there are phrases and words snipped from magazines, landing together to create found poetry and serendipitous sentences.
Faces emerge from the blobs of color, the torn paper shapes and the negative space in between.
It’s weird, it shouldn’t work, but it all seems to come together in a way I never could have predicted.
I can’t tell you how much fun I had with this book.
These are the pages that have been brightening up my long dark days of winter. As we’ve reached the shortest day I’m calling this project finished and ready to move on to all that comes next.
I’ll be sharing a full flip through video + a SPECIAL HOLIDAY GIFT that this book inspired with all the lovely peeps who get my newsletter this weekend.
Sign up here if you haven’t already done so (and then do check your spam hole cos sometimes the good stuff gets swept up into there by mistake)
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This year’s contribution to the Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Project got filled with a great outpouring of ideas in the final couple of weeks before the deadline. If you already saw the first flip through – this is a longer version – with close ups and all!
This year’s contribution to the Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Project got filled with a great outpouring of ideas in the final couple of weeks before the deadline.
The book itself had been sitting on my desk, quietly waiting for months. Since the start of this year I got waylaid from almost everything else in the studio by the epic paper dying experiments.
I knew, as the weeks ticked by, that I’d be spending those last days in a flurry of paint and collage bits, stitching in new pages and sequins, hidden notes, and whatever else was flooding out of my thoughts onto the pages.
My first idea was to extend my ink dying experiments directly into these pages, but the paper of the sketchbook doesn’t absorb the ink the same way and it just wasn’t working how I wanted it to.
So instead I adapted the ink splotches, like finding patterns in the clouds, I found faces and magical made up animals in the splashes.
On the Library Shelf…
For all you folks local to New York (or passing through) – this book can now be found on the shelves of the Brooklyn Art Library, with a call number of: 360.55-6
Digitised Version…
In a few weeks time my book will be scanned and digitised to see online (like last years, which you can see here).
But you really need to see in her motion to get a sense of her cut out pages, her frills and flounces…
Because sometimes ink blob people and creatures aren’t enough…
Sometimes you need to stitch in extra pages, fold out bits, with secret notes, meaningless messages and nonsense.
So the next best thing to a trip to Brooklyn to meet this creation, is this little filmed flip through I made you.
(If you already saw the first flip through – this is a longer version – with close ups and all!)
While I’m still buzzing on the high of making this book, I’m channeling this energy into daily pages for the #100dayprojectwhich you can follow over on Instagram.
You can be first to find out what I’m busy making and doing with monthly-ish updates direct to your emailbox. Like magic. Just tell me who you are:
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The journey to fill up my book for @sketchbkproject was almost as convoluted as the pages themselves. This is the Mixiest of mixed media!
The journey to fill up my book for the 2018 Sketchbook Project was almost as convoluted as the pages themselves. This is the Mixiest of mixed media!
If you find yourself in Brooklyn, you can see this IRL shelved at the address: 348.59-2 in the Art Library There’s a digitized version to see on their site too.
If you’d like to be first to see what I’m making and doing you’ll wanna catch my newsletters. I send these out once or twice a month with exclusive previews of my artings + links to all that I’m currently enjoying in the interwebs. Hop aboard here!
(Join up in June to snap up a massivenormous bargain in my Etsy Shop so I can make space for more new goodies coming soon)
Since last summer when it arrived, I was chasing my tail with ideas for this project. Four days before the deadline I declared it finished and posted it off to its new home in Brooklyn Art Library.
Since last summer when it arrived, I was chasing my tail with ideas for this project. Three days before the deadline I declared it finished and posted it off to its new home in Brooklyn Art Library.
Look at that paper curl! I appear to have angered the book now.
Having decided to rebind the book in delicious watercolor paper I went off track from my plan and ended up making a bunch of pretty doodles in watercolor, that were fun to make but missed the point of what I wanted to make, and the rebound book sat on my desk for a while in a state of finished-but-no-finished.
Something didn’t feel right.
I couldn’t get myself to film a flip through until when I finally did the edit went all catawompus. I was standing in my own way to package it up to post, to take those last steps.
I kept coming back to the thought that if this is going into a collection that can be seen by anyone and possibly by no-one. In a library of + 36,000 books it should, nonetheless, be representative of what I am.
It should be more me.
A little over a week before the deadline to post it off I was awoken by vivid dreams telling me to begin again: Go back to my first idea. Do it now.
I got up that morning and tore out the fancy watercolor paper pages.
For reasons unknown to me up until then I’d kept those first pages. The original paper with holes where the paint seeped through, with scratchy ballpoint lines and un-erasable pencil lines underneath.
The “Wandering Doodle” as I called it, best seen like this, photoshopped together, it carries a line of wiggles and squiggles throughout the book.
The voice in my dream was saying IT’S A SKETCHBOOK. It’s meant to be sketchy. It’s meant to be about ideas, not nice paintings.
I needed to work around the worn through holes, paint over and collage around the layers of ideas. I needed to fill the book with the thoughts and words and shapes that were torrenting around in my head. That’s the point of a sketchbook. That’s what sketching is.
I spent that weekend sat on the floor of my studio, surrounded with collage cuttings and clippings, paints, pens and inks.
I doodled my little heart out.
I sewed in sequins and crocheted page edges.
I rebound the old pages along with drawings I made decades ago. I poured in words that floated through from podcasts and song lyrics as I went.
If you’d like to see a full flip through of these pages, hop onto my email list here for an exclusive preview next week.
You might remember my first ‘best laid’ plans
Mixy's Art Blog 