I can’t stop…

I’ve been working on my drawing for Life Book 2018 week one “Garden Fairy” lesson with Tamara Laporte. I wanted to go in my own direction with this which is why I’m taking my time. I am so in love with my first sketch I wasn’t sure if I wanted to paint it. This is my first sketch, which was done on watercolor paper.

If you read my previous post you would know I was working on trying to draw the dragon. I couldn’t get the body right so I chose to have him leaning over her shoulder. When I added his scales is when I finally connected with him. As I drew the girl, she just seemed to call out for elfin ears.

The above picture shows how I roughly sketched in flowers but they didn’t feel right to me. This lesson is about considering what we want to leave behind and what we want to bring forward with us. Taking this into consideration I knew I needed to change the flowers, so I worked more on my drawing.

I love drawing mandalas. Therefore, I want to continue bringing mandalas into my artwork so I erased the flowers and added a mandala. I have plans for the center of my mandala.

Tulips are my favorite flower. Last year, I saved some bulbs when some work was being done which caused several bulbs to be dug up. The person doing the work in our complex didn’t seem to care and left them all lying exposed so I gathered them up and replanted them. I wanted to honor this and it felt right to include a couple tulips in my sketch.

This is where I stopped while I considered what I wanted to do. Since my sketch was drawn on watercolor paper, I didn’t want to waste it with a graphite drawing so I decided to see if I could recreate it on a lighter weight mixed media paper. The next picture is my attempt to do just that.

She isn’t exactly like my first drawing. She is close enough and I think she came out rather well. I’ll work on her some more later. For now, this is where I stopped with my second drawing.

I can’t stop drawing her. I pulled out my sketchbook where I was working out the drawing of my dragon and drew another sketch of her. This time with a worried or concerned look on her face. I’m trying to learn different facial expressions and since I seemed to be obsessed with drawing her it made sense to try a different expression.

Then I took out my other journal where I not only draw but also write. A few days prior, I had put down some backgrounds using acrylic paint, mostly just using a card or palette knife to scrape the paint around. I had no idea what I would put on these backgrounds. In my previous post, I wrote about the first background I worked on where I created a mandala. 

On another page, I tried creating a mandala using the dot technique with paint but that didn’t come out so well. I wasn’t going to show it here but after thinking about it, I decided to show it. First, because I wouldn’t be authentic as an artist to just show the “good” stuff. If someone reading this is struggling with their art, they should see that we all struggle and have moments where what we work on doesn’t come out the way we want it to or even passably good. And, that is OKAY. So here it is, including my thoughts I had put on the page.

I might get better with practice, and maybe this would have looked better with a black background which is what I have seen in all the dot techniques used to create mandalas or other dot artwork. Creating dots is harder than it looks. I used different sized brush handles. Even so, one has to remember that with each dot created if you don’t replenish the paint between each dot the subsequent dot will be smaller. If you don’t use the same “pressure” the dots can be different sizes. I didn’t expect perfection and knew this would take some practice. I also learned that maybe I should also create guidelines, at least in the beginning until I become better at it. For now, this isn’t something I want to pursue, even with this small sampling I realized I just don’t enjoy making dot after dot after dot, which might be why I’m not a fan of stippling, though I do use it occasionally.

A day or so ago, I drew another one of my elfin girls on the third page. I drew her in pencil first, and then I went over the pencil with an Elegant Writer pen meant for calligraphy. In my testing of my pens to see if they would bleed when wet, I found I loved the effect when the ink from this pen became wet. I wanted to play around with this. Here is the results. I added a bit of white to her eyes and for highlights but other than that, the shading is from using a small wet brush to make the ink from the Elegant Writer bleed. I ABSOLUTELY LOVE HOW THIS TURNED OUT, so much so, I felt the need to write about it which is what brought me to writing this post.

In regards to my previous drawings. I will eventually paint the first drawing that is on watercolor paper. The second that is on mixed media paper I plan to complete in graphite. I have a feeling I’m not done with drawing my elfin girl and expect she will turn up again and again. But… most of all, I have a love of INK and want to play more with it.

Other thoughts:

It may seem strange for me to still be working on week one of Life Book 2018. I see some people doing the lessons as soon as they are released. I started that way for Life Book 2017 which was fine if all I wanted to do was copy the lesson as close as I could with what was being taught. This worked well for the first half of the year. Starting a new job set me back a bit but I also realized, though I was learning by doing the lessons as they were taught, I needed to explore more on my own.

Copying exactly as a teacher instructs doesn’t allow for experimentation. It also doesn’t allow much for failures from making my own choices therefore I don’t learn what works and what doesn’t work. I don’t want to be copying a teacher’s styles and techniques my whole life so I need to learn what works or doesn’t work for me.

When I first considered Life Book as a course of instruction, I did so because I wanted to use art as a way to help me. It is hard to look at one’s life, thoughts and emotions and feel like one is out of control or felt as though they had wasted the majority of their life. I had so many feelings, not just about my past but what had transpired in the past few years, that I needed to find a way to process it all.

Most people who felt as I do or had gone through similar experiences would probably see a therapist. Believe me I considered it. However, when I was diagnosed with cancer and started the process of fighting it and recovery, I decided to see a therapist. I took my daughter with me for I felt she would benefit as well. This whole situation was terrifying to her. At no time during that session did I feel like this person would be able to help me or my daughter. I wasn’t expecting miracles in just one session but I did expect some effort on this person’s part to help us or to just give us an indication of how they might be able to help. In the end, the only thing we walked out with was the understanding that I was already doing what I needed to do. With this in mind I started looking into art as a way to help me do it even better. This is when I discovered Life Book.

I haven’t stopped with just Life Book. I look at other courses as well. I look at them to give me one of two things. Either they will help me learn how to art journal in a way which will help me work through my emotional journey, or they will help me increase my skills and gain further knowledge in various art techniques. The wonderful thing about Life Book is it does both and introduces me to a lot of wonderful teachers.

Last year, because my main focus was on just copying the art as close to exacting as I could, I didn’t learn as much as I had hoped to in the area of processing my emotions when working on my page. What I was processing was only the technical aspects of the techniques being taught. I wanted to change that. I didn’t want to do art, just to do art, I wanted to find ways to have my art and my emotions come together and express themselves on the page.

In consideration of this, I decided to chose a word for the year. I had never done this before. I decided to do this to see if it helped bring focus into my life and help provide direction. For 2018, I chose balance as my word for this year to try and bring more of a balance between the emotional art journey and the technical art journey. It also has the added benefit of helping me to focus on finding balance in all areas of my life.

Knowing this, I knew I couldn’t rush through my lessons. Let me explain something.

I have always wished I could think faster on my feet. Wishing it though has never resulted in it actually happening. Instead of wishing for it, I decided to understand myself better, which meant being honest with myself. I have no idea how people view me unless they tell me. During my life, I have had people tell me I am rather intelligent. While this might be true, I have to refrain from believing my inner critic when he/she tells me I’m not smart at all. After all, if I were smart I would think faster on my feet and be able to respond to people in the way I wish I could. That is if I would believe what my inner critic says.

I, however, have come to understand, First, I AM intelligent. Second, my intelligence demands that I take my time to consider what I know or don’t know, and sometimes if I need to know more, it requires research. Third, I am also not quick to understand my own emotions and sometimes it takes me a while to dig into them to understand what they are and what triggered them. Because of this, almost every situation I’m in, I am not quick to respond because my way of doing things is, first to understand what I am feeling, why I feel that way and to take time to think about it and not jump into quick conclusions or decisions. People wanting quick responses and quick answers get frustrated with me, and yes, I get the impression that they might think I’m dumb but this is because they do not know me and I don’t always think to say that I need to think about this before I answer. I will admit that sometimes I over think things, and sometimes it is difficult for people to understand why I need to think about something that should only require a simple answer.

There is no surprise that this is how I approach my own art. We are at the end of January and to know that week one has taken me four weeks and I’m still not complete isn’t a concern for me. In the past it might have been but that would have been before I took the time to do my own self-analysis to understand why I do things as I do or why I react to things as I do and so forth. Doing my own self-analysis doesn’t mean I am always right. In fact, there are times when I need to re-evaluate because something doesn’t add up to what I had previous thought about myself. There isn’t anything wrong with that and I am sure therapists are having to do this all the time with their clients. There is just no way someone can know everything there is to know about another person and besides, we humans whether we want to admit it or not, are changing all the time. I will be the first to admit that this is even true for myself.

I have no doubt there would be a lot of people who would argue this point. Their egos would want them to believe they know themselves implicitly. I love the part in The Matrix where Neo is told “Know thyself”. On one hand we already know everything there is to know about ourselves while on the other hand, we know absolutely nothing about who we really are.  Neo walks out of the room, so confused, believing he isn’t what people believe him to be. He doesn’t believe in himself. He doesn’t believe it until circumstances put him into a position where he has to reach inside of himself to be what he needs to be, proving to him that he has always had it inside of himself to be whatever he needs to be.

This is true for all of us. Sometimes what we need to be isn’t at all what we think we should be. It is no different for me in my art. I think my art should be realistic, not whimsical or even be mandalas. If someone had asked me back in high school what kind of artist I would be, I would have said my art would be ‘realism’. I had never heard of mandalas or at least I don’t remember hearing about them back then so I would not have even considered myself to be a mandala artist. And yet, that is what I have become. I also lean more towards whimsical at this stage which I would never have thought possible because back in high school I had trouble drawing anything from my imagination.

Why am I writing about all of this? First, because I need to explore the depths of these things for myself and writing is how I do that. Second, because this is just an example of how my mind works and why I am not quick on rebuttals or responses in various situations. I have to THINK about whatever it is that requires my response. My thought processes are not short. They can be long and involved and writing helps me to work my way through my thought processes.

I use the same process for my artwork. Consequently, I don’t expect immediate answers or results. I don’t sit down and immediately make decisions on what I’m going to create and then create it. Oh sometimes I do but most times like the Garden Fairy, I need to go through this process.

I knew when I first watched Tam’s Garden Fairy lesson that I would draw a female face but I knew it wouldn’t be a copy of the face she drew. I knew from my meditation that my animal would be a dragon. But that is all I knew. It took a while of thinking about my dragon to understand I didn’t want to copy a dragon I found online. To draw him took research of looking at various pictures then setting them aside to start sketching on my own and only referring to pictures once in a while to get shape and form properly in perspective. It took more contemplation on what I wanted to represent my garden.

The third reason I write about all of this is hopefully so other artists who are new to exploring their own abilities learn that there isn’t anything wrong with taking their time to complete a lesson. The wonderful thing about online classes, especially ones where you can download them or have lifetime access to them is this, you can do them in your own time, at your own speed and repeat them as often as you like AND do them in whatever form you want to do them in. Classroom instruction doesn’t give you this flexibility, nor do the online instructions which give you only a limited time access and no downloadable content. My advice especially for beginners is choose courses wisely and take advantage of YouTube’s free content.

I want to write about one other thing. I know this is getting long but after writing the above and having a break to go off and work and think about other things, I had this thought come to me. I don’t PHYSICALLY practice my artwork every day. I do THINK about my artwork EVERY day. If I’m not physically practicing, I am viewing other people’s artwork, reading about it or watching videos, or thinking about how I might go about doing some technique or trying different things. I might consider in my mind, what if, I do this, or what if, I do something else, or what if, I combine this and that. In my mind I’ll try and imagine what might be the result of doing that ‘what if’ and in some cases it might take me to my art table to see if what I imagined is in fact what happens. Most times though I’m thinking about sketching or painting, especially watercolor and how I blend, or push the paint around. In my mind, I’m creating a number of art pieces.

Here is where some people might consider me crazy, but it is a proven fact that athletes do improve from just meditating on running or doing whatever physical activity they want to do more than if they just practice it physically. I believe this is also true for artists. If it weren’t true then I could never explain how I improved in my portrait sketches after months of not physically doing any drawing and only thinking or using my imagination and creating sketches mentally. So don’t underestimate the power of the mind. If you don’t have the time to physically do the work, I bet you have plenty of mentally free time where you can do the work in your imagination. Waiting in lines at the grocery store for instance, or waiting in a doctor’s office when you don’t have a small travel pack of art materials to play around with. Or waiting in traffic. Or walking the dog. I could go on and on. My point here is I probably create more in my head than I do in physical substance and there isn’t anything wrong with that. In fact,  I believe it is key to learning and becoming a better artist. I just can’t stop…  I do it all the time, sometimes even in my sleep.

What do you think? Let me know. Or just write a comment to let me know you were here and read my post.

A Logical Analytical Artist

After my previous post, I was led to check out a couple Facebook groups I have been a member of over the past year. I am sorry to admit that I haven’t paid much attention to them over the year. I needed to revisit them to try and understand why.

One group I revisited is called “My Year 2017”. It is run by a lovely group of ladies who provide art videos every month. I believe they are based off of the monthly prompt they provide. The videos are meant to help give people different ideas of what they can create artistically from being inspired by the prompt. After reviewing the group again, and working on November’s prompt, at first I thought it would be up my alley, but after doing it I realized that isn’t the case.

First, let me explain that November’s prompt in the way Gina explained her approach, the words she picked and how they connected for her helped to give me some hope. For the past few weeks I’ve been contemplating my purpose in life. I knew this would come at some point because of my new job and would make me question my choices. For the past few weeks I’ve been feeling like I have no purpose and I have just been biding my time here until the next phase in whatever may come. Gina’s video and the five words she chose were very meaningful to me and helped give me hope that I will find a new purpose in this life.

You can find Gina’s video here.  I won’t post what I created or give the prompt or description of what she created because I don’t want to take that away from her. She worked hard on the video and I believe it is worth viewing if you are interested. The reason I mention it here is to try and give you some insight into the way my brain works. I am vain enough to think someone might be interested in the workings of my brain. lol Besides I just copied what she created because I wanted to have it to remind me of what I learned from her.

Let me explain something else, following art instruction videos takes the pressure off of trying to come up with my own idea for what to create. For a very logical and analytical mind, this process gives my brain a time to stop all its analytical mumbo jumbo and just do what someone is instructing me to do. I don’t have to think of what will work or not work together or how I need to prep something so what I want to do next will work. It takes the pressure off. For my learning mind this is great because I get to experience without having to think much about it and most times I end up with something I’m very pleased with.

Now… if you don’t have an analytical mind like me then you might not understand just how wonderful it is for me to take an art class like the ones I have been taking this past year. This past year which is actually coming up on two years in January, has been a time of great mental strain. My brain has been analyzing, over analyzing, painstakingly logical in trying to find solutions for me that would create the ultimate solution for the situation I found myself within. I had to find something that would be a safe haven for me and allow my brain to just STOP. To just LET GO. This is what the art courses this past year have been about, as well as, the wonderful part of also learning and experiencing different techniques and supplies.

Now… think about what it means to try and create something from a prompt, whether it is a one word prompt or a quote or something in which the artist is to dig in deep to try and discover what meaning or relevance it has in their lives. This was too much for me. I was already analyzing every single thing in my life, so trying to take a simple word and do what I’ve been doing every minute of every single day for a year, well, it wasn’t going to happen. Not when art for me was supposed to be a place of refuge, a place that brought my mind and my heart peace.

So when I first thought “My Year 2017” was going to be something I would enjoy, instead, it turned out to be something I avoided. When I reviewed the group a couple days ago, and though I found November’s prompt had meaning for me, I realized, it wasn’t the prompt as much as it was Gina’s message in her video in regards to how she approached it, the words she chose and her explanation of how the words connected for her, that had meaning for me. I accepted this but also knew it was a message to not avoid the videos. When I have time I will view the videos provided by this group to see what message they may provide for me. Who knows maybe when my mind has had enough rest, it will work on a prompt or two.

One of the ladies from “My Year 2017” group also does a Pick 10 challenge. The Pick 10 challenge is about picking 10 prompts and using them to create an art journal page. This is different from the prompt I mentioned earlier. These prompts are either art supplies, or art techniques or simple instructions, like use the color red. You do the prompts in the order they are drawn. These are the types of prompts I can get into right now because you don’t have to think about it. When you first see the prompt you go with what first pops into you head and just do it. The fun part is seeing what happens. Here is a picture of what I created from November’s Pick 10, you can see the video here, of what Cindy created. I used the same prompts she pulled for November. I just added the words which wasn’t a prompt just something I felt drawn to do after the page was completely dry. I also added some white highlights which wasn’t a prompt either. I needed the white to help bring the words out more and some of the elements.

When I work on faces or try and create my own art journal page, for me, it takes a lot of thought, mostly because I haven’t been doing this long enough to give over completely to my intuition. This is why, for now, art classes are so important to me.

The past week was physically draining on me. I worked seven days in a row, most days were only four or five hour shifts, with the last day being an eight hour shift. I was exhausted by the end and was glad I had three days off to recover. Each day when I was home trying to rest my feet and body, I would work on something, usually I like working on mandalas. However, I’ve been challenging myself to try and go beyond mandalas and try my hand at abstract floral art.  My previous post shows one I completed recently. This is the one I started next and is a work in progress.

I’m still rather basic in the layout for this type of work. I find it very difficult to figure out how to do overlapping elements. This is why I’m challenging myself with this type of art. For years I allowed myself to be held back by my lack of confidence in my ability to create what I want. Faces was one of these things I didn’t have much confidence in being able to do. I let that stop me for years from doing anything art related so now when I find something that makes me feel like I can’t do it, I now want to challenge that mentality and break through whenever possible. Here is an example of doing just that:

This piece was created from Week 28 of Life Book 2017. Yes, week 28, I just finished it today. It is a bonus lesson given by Jamie Dougherty. I avoided this lesson for months and I let myself think I was doing so because of all the stuff going on in my life. Indeed, part of the reason was that but another part of it was because it challenged me. The class was about facing your negative thoughts about yourself and incorporating it in a fascinating way by using ash and mixing it into the portrait. I won’t give any more details than that because it would give too much away about the lesson. The lesson is called “From the Ashes”.

What held me back was facing my negative thoughts. Oh, I know I have them, but it is very different to know you have them than it is to purposefully focus on them. This was daunting but once I got started I wanted to see it through. I like how she turned out.

I don’t exactly call this a block when I avoid doing a lesson or something I find difficult to face. I’ve heard other artists asking how other artists deal with this type of situation and ask how they get through it. A good many of those answering tend to say just barrel through it. One person actually said she sits down in front of a page and just sits with her feelings. She might sit there for a few minutes or an hour or whatever it takes before she is ready to start working on it.

That isn’t how I approach it.

In fact, whether it is my art, or something I need to do in life, I approach it the same way. If when I think I need to so something, whether it is a lesson, a task, or even something like renewing my passport, IF, at the time I’m thinking about doing it, IF, I feel a strong compulsion to NOT do it, then I DON’T. I will revisit it after a period of time and if the feeling is still there, then I wait and revisit it again and again and again until that compulsion to NOT do it is no longer there. I wait until I feel a strong compulsion to DO IT. When that happens then I know the time is right.

I know, I know, there is the risk of this approach creating serious issues. Let’s say this happens when I know my passport is about to expire, this could cause me problems with other things in my life if I don’t do what needs to be done. I could possibly miss out on a trip I wanted to take. So you might think this approach could end up very bad for me in some situations, BUT, I’m here to tell you it has never caused me a problem. IN FACT, it has saved me in more situations than I can count and in more ways than I can ever tell you.

In the past, I have tried to push through the strong compulsions I feel and go ahead and do what I felt needed to be done regardless of how strong I felt about not doing it. This either ended up with me in a very stressful situation, where I was overwhelmed and battling situations that would not have happened if I had waited, or I ended up frustrated because of roadblocks, unbelievable roadblocks were thrown in the way. In some cases it has helped me avoid situations I didn’t want any part of.

Take my art for example, if the next class up in the schedule of classes is one I feel strongly compelled to not do and I try and push my way through it, I very often regret it. I regret it because I become frustrated over it and what I’m trying to do doesn’t work out the way I want it to because I’m frustrated and trying to force something that should otherwise have been enjoyable in the doing of it. I have learned it is better to wait out the feelings and then do the class when I have felt that compulsion switch from not doing it to doing it. I then have a much more pleasant experience with the class and working with the products.

This same thing happens in other things in my life if I follow those feelings. I consider this following my intuition regardless of how illogical it may seem. For me, it is quite logical.

Maybe this will help explain my mind to those who understand and are a bit logical in their own thinking. In most of the courses I’ve been taking this year, there is only one which should be done in the order specified. All the others can be done in a random order. Even so, my mind is one that really wants to do things in the order they are given. This benefits me in so many ways even when it isn’t necessary to do it that way. I know I don’t have to do them in order, but even so, I have not jumped ahead in any of the courses. When I try, it feels wrong. Learning to follow my intuition is about following what feels right.

So there you have it, my mind in a nutshell, so to speak. Take me down the path step-by-step in a logical linear fashion and I’m fine. Take me down a path that jumps from thither and yon and then back again and though I have a wonderful sense of direction, it will feel all wrong. Maybe that is why I find mandalas so easy to draw and the abstract floral drawings such a challenge.