It’s a 12 month journey through 12 colours: exploring, experimenting, collaborating, painting, playing.
Each month is dedicated to its own single color, and January is all about YELLOW.
We start here… you wanna come along? It’s going to be so much fun 🙂
Maybe it’s a throw back to school days, for me September has never lost that New-Beginning-y feel.
This bit of year where the edges of summer and fall meet up, crossover a little, shimmy back and forth for a week or two before chillier times set in for proper.
I love all the seasons, but I most enjoy the beginning part of each one.
All the first-in-a-long-whiles — the little things, the details — I revel in these. Now is the season of crunchy leaves, soup, socks, dark evenings with candlelight and blankets, all of it has novelty value for the first few weeks.
As the season turned I came to the end of my art journal that I played in through the summer, so last week – to coincide with the Equinox – I began this new book.
I also began I new way of documenting – by time lapse photo. I reckon by the end of this book I’ll have perfected the recording and editing, it’s a learning curve, which I’ll share with you here.
Enjoy! 🙂
Who needs a bit of bright sunshiny colour to start their week off? I know I always do.
(curious where this idea came from — or where it could be leading to? well, it sprang from my ‘take nine’ class in the new 21 Secrets program. … and it’s leading to some more things I’ll be workington this week and showing you really soon 🙂
A few years ago I created a year long project, dedicating each month to a single colour. Beginning in January with red/purple – that gorgeous magenta I keep falling back into – I cycled my way month by month through the primary/secondary/tertiary colours, ending the year in Red.
Ever since I’ve had the desire to follow up on this and reinvent the idea.
So while I haven’t been over here in the world of Ephemeral-Gecko-ing, I’ve been busying myself on a new project ….but you will have to wait until tomorrow for all the details….
Meanwhile, here’s what the 12 colours in 12 months adventure looked like:
…the more you see.
Have you ever been on a color hunt? You can do it right now – pick a color and look around you, as soon as you choose to see, it pops up all over the place. I went looking for primaries in the everyday everythings…
You don’t need to go anywhere special, you can cast your eyes around while you sit at the traffic lights or stand in line at the shops.
Look around your town, your home, your wardrobe, your bookcase, your refrigerator…
Tune in to a color and it will appear like magic!
It’s a continuing theme…
We are back in the book again. Come in, have a stroll round…
It’s a bit wordy underfoot so mind your step.
There’s a regularity to the irregular once you get used to it here.
There’s a quiet comfort in the uncertainty.
And as in the parallel world outside, no-one’s really sure what’s going on.
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
…live in the question.”
Welcome to my circus of uncertainty
Just sometimes I can’t settle and be at peace with a painting.
It’s out there somewhere, or tucked away in a book, and it’s niggling me.
It’s cropping up in my thoughts and interfering in my whatever’s-happening-next-ness.
Last week’s page of the page-a-week project was one of them.
Look, here she is. She looks mis-coloured.
What’s a page with no yellow? No warmth?
No.
Where’s her depth? Can’t leave her cold like this.
Bring on the warm tones!
(I’m happy now!)
This recurring instruction: Create Your Own Map.
It’s what I’m endeavoring to do.
I’m mapping my way as I go.
I document when I remember,
I share when I think it might help.
Starting out in the usual fashion:
Colours and curls,
Cut outs, collaging the inconsequential,
daubs, dabs, smudgy smear.
State the intention.
Then populate:
Look up, look down. Look around
Remember it’s the journey not the destination.
My weeks now begin (as this year did) on a Thursday. I like this! It breaks up the week/weekend pattern in a refreshing fashion and in a way seems to make time stretch. I’m a busy person, this is enormously helpful! Week 2 of this year started out on a drainy-grainy grey day and I really needed to counteract that, so I did in the only way I know how: with colors.
I began with a wash over white gesso with Pebeo Colorex chartreuse ink I LOVE this color! This is my happy color! although it gets covered over through the week, little bits are still shining through.
The page already had a smeary something (acrylic paint? I forget already) on the right page which discolored to a nasty beige with the ink smears. But no matter, it’ll be obscured with stuff before long. To begin with, the same three strange eye-fish as last week. I can’t really explain them yet, I’ll come back to them later.
Swimming through the inks.
Slipping behind the doodled-on beige paint slick. The eye-fish do their thing…
Then it got some washes and splashes in Adirondack Stream. Close and open the book for a bitova Rorschach style ink spreading manoeuvre.
That puddly wet ink was just crying out for something a bit more lively and vibrant, so on with the Derwent Inktense
I love the variety of marks you can get scribbling on splashed paper, the wet and dry work well for doodling into with a fine paintbrush and water.
So that’s where my week began, It’s progressing a bit more each day so check back soon to see the next transitions 🙂
Mixy's Art Blog 