day 4: 12 days of Twelvty

Over the last 12 days of the year I’m sharing my year of color: 12 colors in 12 months. Today –
Twelvty-Four: Blue-Green

Twelvty-Four: Blue-Green

Teal, Turquoise, Mermaids & Peacocks

“A turquoise given by a loving hand carries with it happiness and good fortune.”
~ Arabic proverb

Color is an integral part to all types of creativity.

Colors have been assigned meanings and connections throughout history and around the world.

Sometimes these overlap and sometimes they are contradictory. Color is a great metaphor for so many aspects this wildly paradoxical trip we call life.

Through 2017 I’ve been exploring color in a year long visual adventure: devoting myself to just one color each month.

In Twelvty-Four I had the most fun making a series of layered stitched collages, made from dyed paper and fabrics, embellished with beads and buttons and shiny things.

Each month also has a few pages of single color doodles in this mixed media art journal.

Over the last 12 days of the year I’m sharing a glimpse of this 12 month project.

We began with Yellow, Yellow-Green, then Green tomorrow we’ll step around to Twelvty-Five: Blue

If you’re interested in understanding more about color, get my ebook A Year full of Color as well as regular monthly updates on my latest colorful antics, delivered right to your inbox:

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Next year I’m revisiting the Twelvty project, but this time with some exciting additions! Find out more here

Registration for TWELVTY 2018 is open now!
Find out more & join here

Bringing Brightness to you!

Bringing Brightness to you! Flash Sale of Textile & Mixed Media Art. Help me make space in my studio to make more deliciously colourful goodies!

Flash Sale of Textile & Mixed Media Art

Help me make space in my studio to make more deliciously colourful goodies!

These pieces are all from my TWELVTY Year of Color Series:

Ranging from bright sunshine lemon, through fresh citrus-lime and olive-moss greens, to emerald, jade, and the peacock-mermaid tones of turquoise and summer-sky blues. Oh my!

Half the rainbow is here, and these creations are ready n waiting to be shipped to their new homes.

Do you have a place in your home that needs brightening with color? Clickety-hop on over to my Etsy Shop this week and snap up a bargain. Many of these listings end this week so it’s a last chance opportunity! And 25% off too!!

Would you like monthly updates on my artings and thinkings delivered right to your inbox? Hop onto my email list right here.

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(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. It will be hidden in a very secret place & guarded by dragons.

Collections

I love sets of things, I love arrangements & collections.

When I hear a song I love, I have to scurry off as soon as I can to find the album it’s from, find the artist, track down the other tracks. Fall in love again.

When my eyes are magnetised by a piece of art, I race to seek out the artist and soak in everything else they’ve created.

I’ve done this with authors and poets, actors, directors, blogs and my current jam: podcasts. I get hooked. I have to absorb all I can until my attention is hooked someplace else.

This energy directs me, and now I’ve identified it, I can see how it plays out in all kinds of ways.

I’ve had attachment to all sorts of obsession, with habits and ritual, with a certain style of living or eating or being, with a form of minutiae that maybe only I notice, but it’s place in my days has been critical. For the moment. Then gone.

Sometimes it’s a few days, sometimes a few years, or anywhere in between. The more life I live the more context for this observation and the more patterns I can see.

Right now I’m channelling this obsessive method into making. I’m filling every moment, pouring every ounce of energy into making, and will do so until the next hook catches me. That maybe tomorrow – maybe next year – I’ll show you when.

It’s manifesting itself right now as a collection of paper and fabric collages, I’m calling the Peacock & Mermaid collection. This is part two. I don’t know if there will be a part three – I might get called away by another muse.

All of the pieces shown here are available in my Etsy shop. The first part of the collection sold out the first day – so hop over quick if you’d like one of them in your home!

Would you like to 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. It will be hidden in a secret place, I will feed it tea and biscuits as required.

Mermaids & Peacocks

colorwheel I’ve just spent a month dwelling in a color I love so much: blue-green, and I have to admit it wasn’t easy to move on!

In this year full of color, as I journey around the color wheel, I’m devoting each month to a single color, and April was all about teal, turquoise and sea-shades of aquamarine. These are the colors of a magical world inhabited by peacocks & mermaids. And me!

At the end of each month I add the fruits of my makings to my Etsy Shop — there are only three of these in existence, so catch ’em while you can!

Mounted on 8 inch square canvas board, these are layered collages of hand dyed paper and cotton & silk fabric intricately detailed with little weeny glass beads and stitching.

They are ready to hang as soon as they arrive in their new homes.
Welcome to the underwater realms of my imagination …

Evolution of a Ideas

I love the dance between the digital and the analog.

Set the pixels in place, print and then set to with the tools of a previous age:

Actual cutting with actual scissors

Actual mess with actual paste.

The combination of these colours and the sheen of the medium have given her heads a pearly purity.

(And all that baldness was bothering me.
It’s getting lost now under layers of cut out swirls.)

Poured paint, deluge of color.
But tonally bland.

Contrast added. A sea of souls.

“The Creative Flow”

Set with the challenge to create two works – any media, any format – with the dual themes of Water and The Creative Process. If you’ve been following the story that started out a few weeks ago, then you’ll know I finally reached the point I’m calling these paintings finished!

I loved the way they evolved. I made it my mission to let go of any fixed idea of final outcome, and let the creative process flow like water. You know me, I love a metaphor! Would I do anything differently if I did this again? sure I would! But that’s why it’s called a practice, right?

Anyhoo… you’ve read enough words, now for the pictures!

Grace (14/52)

Have you ever been followed about by a word?

Not a new word, just a word you haven’t noticed much before… then it seems to crop up all over the place? It keeps dropping into conversation and reading.

See, there she is again. I wanted to check against my imagination… is this really happening?

But when she’s there again, on the facing page when you open up the remains of a dictionary you began to dye and dismantle more than 2 years ago.

Well ….

So there she is, Grace, large as life. She was part of my week in all senses.

So to Sewing

Inspired by the enormously talented Morwenna Catt and her wonderful quirky stoles, I felt compelled to make something similar…

I have all this fabric and trimmings and whatnot, sitting around waiting to be purposed. And what better purpose than a mad turquoise friend.

I was aiming for a cat shaped face, but looks a little more doggish to me. Maybe some ear adjustment and whiskers will bring it round. Either way, I’m kinda fond of this new addition to the family.

More Focus & Trust 1/52

So last night I polished off the first week of my 2015 week by week art journal. Little tweaks and changes…. more emphasis on Trust – I gotta trust in this process,

and more focus on the word Focus. Got me thinking about focusing on what this week has meant to me.

The big silvery full moon (which kept me awake Sunday & Monday nights) is now shining from the top of the page. Full moons symbolise the stage of a cycle which is full on, full volume: intensity. As the peak of night brightness passes and the moon wanes the power subsides but I feel like it’s added strength to my convictions and spirited up my wishes.

Y’know I told you about my goals for 2015… I’ve been working on weight training and this week I upped my eek-I-can-just-about-lift-it weight by another 5kg. Little by little I’m realising that dream! The incentive behind my desire to get stronger is to improve my yoga practice. I’d so love to be able to do this. (and so much more… but this would make me happy for a start!)

Thanks to the darling Adriene, of ‘Yoga with Adriene‘, from this week I’ve been practicing with a new found daily discipline. I love her gentle, easy going style, she’s doing this wonderful 30 day program on YouTube. If you’re even a little bit interested in yoga, go check this out, it’s so lovely!

So that’s where I’m at for now; Now onto week 2/52!

week by week 1/52

There’s something so deliciously enlivening about the start of a new thing

…a new year

…a new book

…a new project

In past years I’ve played with different art journaling projects, from page a day to a page a month. This time around it’s a page a week.

So, 2015, here we go!

Week 1 has been a painty brain-dump.

The only thing I had in mind to start was colour: I’m in a big ole red/magenta/turquoise vibe this week. Look at them ZING!

I primed the pages with gesso and began with some dollopy finger-painting. This process was fun but produced a textured surface so crunchy it really precluded writing with anything finer than a big soft marker. So the words are big n few.

I found some phrases through the week which stuck in my head:

Focus (my word for the year)

Let down your guard and Trust (I’ve read this in more than one place. So it’s a sign, right?)

Stand in your Light (I’ve heard myself say I’ve been standing in my own way a few times, this is a better place for me to be!)

Speak your Truth (it doesn’t have a meaning I can grasp at the moment, but I sense I might come back to this one later and see what I can’t see right now – ‘the woods for the trees’ maybe. What the hey, good solid advice.)

I wrote out the Holstee Manifesto. It’s mostly buried under layers of paint now. But I know it’s in there….the line “Some opportunities only come once, seize them” is just showing enough still to remind me: I want to compose a 2015 manifesto for myself.