Art Journaling and Flowers…

From time to time I read other artist’s blogs. More often though, I read their comments on Facebook through artist/creative groups or in the emails they send out to their subscribers. If I didn’t do this, I know my journey would feel like a very lonely one or I might have given up on it long ago. I know I am not alone with trying to work through various aspects of my journey which I feel the need to write about in this post today.

This is just a short list of what is on my mind today:

1. Watching/Viewing other artists as they create
2. Trying to figure out what medium I should work in
3. Is it my style or just a replica of another person’s style
4. Avoidance/procrastination, which is it

The first, watching/viewing  other artists as they create, causes interesting reactions, and often conflicting reactions within me. What draws me to watching other artists and why do I watch them? If, I watch an artist, it is because there is something about their work which intrigues me. Either, I love what they create or there is something about what they create which intrigues my imagination. In both cases, it creates a desire to want to learn. In the later, after observing their process, I may or may not want to attempt duplicating the technique. In the former, watching usually results in a desire to try and replicate the technique, and the artist usually makes it look easier than it is. I can easily fall into the trap of listening to my inner critic telling me I’ll never be able to do what the artist did which can result in various outcomes. One being I never try it. Another being I try it and get really frustrated because it is harder than anticipated, resulting in feelings of inadequacy, which may or may not result in continued attempts hopefully resulting in an adequate duplication of the technique. Another could be, and has happened on rare occasions where the technique either comes naturally to me or I am pleased immediately with how well I am able to duplicate it. Then on even rarer occasions I find a way to adapt the technique. This last is new for me.

The second on my list, trying to figure out what medium I should work in, is something I never thought would become an issue. Discovering mixed media, at first, felt like a Godsend. I suddenly felt like I had discovered something which wouldn’t confine me to a set of rules and I could do anything I wanted to do. As I added different mediums to my supplies for some of the courses I was taking, it was easy to choose the supplies to use according the course and create the lesson. However, when it came to creating my own art journal page or artwork, I had no idea what medium to use or mixture of mediums to use. I think this is because I relied too much on following the instructor’s lesson. Whenever, I played around on my own, many times the results were less than satisfactory, occasionally I would be pleasantly surprised by the outcome. The sheer volume of optional mediums to use can be staggering and impede the ability to make a choice as to which one to use.

The third, is it my style or just a replica of another person’s style, sort of goes along with the second item. I struggle a lot with trying to figure out what to create. I want to create something which is unique to me, something which tells my own story. I look at what I create from the lessons/courses I have to learn from and though I love what I created, when I look at them, I’m immediately reminded of the artwork the instructor created. It doesn’t feel like me. I don’t feel “me” emanating from the artwork. There are a couple where I attempted to “do my own thing” while still following the lesson and from those, what emanates from the artwork is a feeling of my inner struggles while creating them.  Below is an example:

very close to lesson

slight variation from lesson

complete variation from lesson

The bear is a very close approximation of a lesson from Life Book 2018. The second, I tried to add some of my own style to another Lesson in Life Book 2018 while incorporating some of the elements from the lesson. The third is completely my own for the same lesson as the second one. (I wrote about each of these in other posts here on my blog.) Though I really love the first one, it isn’t something that naturally comes to mind when I think about creating something all my own and when I look at it I see Tam (the instructor) all over it. When I look at the second one, the colors, the mixture of elements, all awaken the struggles I had when creating it. It was far from easy. The third one, emanates a strong sense of joy when I look at it. There were moments when I struggled with it but those moments are muted by the pure joy of how it all came together in the end.

This is what I want when I create something on my own. I don’t want to look at it and see another person’s style emanating from it like the first one. I know there will be times when I struggle like in the second one to find what works best for me, but I would rather it not have elements of another person’s style when those elements are not something I would naturally select.

I have often wondered how I know something is my own style. I think the three images above are a good example. Though the third is far removed from the other two in regards to subject or chosen elements, it definitely helps me to understand how I can use my emotional response to gauge what is my style and what isn’t.

The last on my list, avoidance/procrastination which is it, is something I have struggled with my whole life and not just in artwork. Some would probably say I avoid until I can’t avoid it anymore. Others would say I procrastinate until I have no other choice or the guilt becomes too much. I don’t ask for opinions from other people because they aren’t in my head to know what all is circling around up there which influences my decisions. More times than not, in other areas of my life, what looks like procrastination, what feels like procrastination, is my subconscious reading the universe and deciding on the best time to do whatever it is that is waiting to be done. Before that moment arrives I usually find obstacles in the way if I try and force the universe to bend to my will. When the moment arrives I will enter into a flurry of activity and nothing gets in my way, more often than not, doors are open before I even get to them.

Why is this in my list of things I’m trying to work through on my journey? Believe me, in this world, or as I was taught as a child, procrastination isn’t a good thing. Procrastination is thought of as avoidance, instead of as a tool. I have to fight against the brainwashing we receive as children to believe certain things, so many things which get in the way of feeling good about myself. This is just one of those. I have many examples where procrastination resulted in a good outcome, better than if I had tried to force the universe to my will, which would or could have been disastrous. Listening to that inner voice which tells me to do this, instead of that, and that tiny voice niggling at me saying I’m procrastinating has such a negative vibe, yes, it is something I need to alter the resonance of within myself.

In artwork, it can mean the difference between creating what my soul is calling out for me to do or slopping on mediums because I feel it needs to be done and not recognizing myself anywhere within it.

These are some of the things which have been going through my mind lately, between work, my studies, struggling to know who I am after the past few years of turmoil and what it is I want to do as an artist. In the midst of this, I’ve been feeling very lost and not sure how I can turn things around. Trying to force the universe to conform to what I want hasn’t worked. Not in the least.

I saw a video on Facebook today from one of the “America’s Got Talent” series. The guy who was about to sing, has 6 children that came out of foster care. He was asked what his goal, ambition dream was and he said something (regarding his children) I never heard before but suddenly resonated deeply with me. He said “when you are surviving you can’t dream…”. Everything suddenly clicked with me. I’ve been surviving for the past few years because of the life changing events which have occurred which make me feel as though our very survival has been threatened. Every time I tried to reach out to a dream I once had, or to find a new dream, it just wasn’t possible. It wasn’t there. I couldn’t come up with one. I didn’t understand why until I heard those words today.

Below is an art journal I started to create yesterday, before I heard those words, after I was going through a period of feeling lost, alone, and feeling like I should just give up, let whatever happens, happen.

The words I wrote on the spread which I am considering adding to it once it is complete is this: “I close my eyes and the world disappears. For a moment, I can believe everything is going to be just fine.”

She is done in watercolor. I started by sketching her in pencil and adding a bit of shading in pencil to get the contours correct, as close as I could around her nose. Then I added a very light tint of watercolor, I had left on my palette which looked like a previously mixed skin tone. It was close enough and in fact can barely be seen after I added the none traditional colors for shading.

I decided that some of my stress comes from trying to create exactly as I see things, so I thought using none traditional colors would help ease the stress I put on myself to make things “real”. I was right. I used about three different colors of blue, then some purple for the shading, then added yellow for some highlights. I’m not sure if I’m done with her face. It depends on how it looks once I add her hair and background. I haven’t decided what I’ll do for the hair and background right now. Usually, I don’t decide until, that moment I spoke about earlier (in the procrastination section) comes upon me and I know it is time to pick up my brush and paints.

Oh, I remember  I wanted to say something about selecting the mediums to use. I, often, feel like I should be using acrylic paint in my mixed media art. It isn’t because I love working in the medium. I had to think about why I would feel this way. I think part of it is because it is what I started learning first when I started learning about mixed media. Another reason is because it is in my art supplies and I feel like I should be using it. Another reason is because a lot of artists use it and I think I have to in order to do what I like so much about what they do. But once I tried watercolor (something better than the children’s watercolor, okay, really once I tried Prang) I’ve been hooked. I think I would be perfectly happy not using acrylic paint ever again, however, acrylic will work on other paper that watercolor doesn’t take to at all. So when I’m working in a journal that doesn’t have watercolor paper, or paper that doesn’t react well to water, then acrylic is what I reach for. Otherwise, I’m finding watercolor (sometimes mixed with a touch of white acrylic paint) is my medium of choice.

Back to my journal page. It took me a while to figure out what to create. All I knew was I needed to do something which would help me express what I was feeling. The earlier geometric design I created which was all my own style is nice and worked for what I wanted to do at the time but I knew this page needed something else. As I thought about how I was feeling, I knew I would need a face to help give expression to the page so it became my focal image. The words came after I sketched the face in pencil and knew she would have closed eyes. I have drawn enough faces that I was able to draw this one without a reference photo, except for the nose. I searched noses online and looked at a few of them to try and get the nose shaped better than I’ve done in previous pieces. I’m getting there.

I think I did good on not having the face look like any faces from other artists I’ve taken some lessons from. The hair though, in just the rough sketch is too reminiscent of one or two other artists, so it might change. This is where I have to let things germinate for a while to see what my imagination comes up with. For now, this is where I’m at.

I wanted to share the next few pictures because I’m thrilled with what I’m seeing. A few weeks ago I decided to pick out a couple plants and plant them in a flower pot to sit on my balcony. I wasn’t sure how well I would do with them or if I would end up killing them. I’m not great at keeping up with my inside plants so wasn’t sure how gardening outside would work out.

These are pictures of the plants. I may add more pictures in later posts if they continue to do well. There are two kinds but the two in the center don’t have any flowers right now. Like most flowering plants when you transplant them, it can cause a shock to the plant making them lose their flowers. It can be a bit of a crap shoot on whether they make it or not. The plants around the outside of the pot lost all the flowers they had in bloom after I transplanted them but now they are blooming all over the place. I’m just thrilled to pieces about this and our dog seems to like them as well. He’ll sniff them and then go lie down by them in the sunshine.  It appears the ones in the center have new buds coming up so can’t wait to see them. They are taller than the other flowers with large blooms and a different color so I’m thrilled to see them surviving and flourishing.

A few weeks ago I planted some seeds (pansies and petunias) inside. They are sprouting rather nicely. I hope to plant them outside in the next few weeks. I’ll have some nice flowers to use for some real life sketching if I can get past my perfectionist critic.

The art of “what if”…

This week, since my last post, has been busy with work. Those who work as a cashier where standing on your feet for an 8 hour shift is part of their job, know how exhausting it can be. In four days, I worked three 8 hour shifts. Going into my 8th month my body is finally becoming accustomed to it. My feet ached but only for a couple hours after getting home. My energy levels were fine which meant cooking dinner wasn’t an impossible chore and my muscles and tendons didn’t lock up on me after sitting for thirty minutes at a time. In those 8 months I have gradually lost 15 pounds. This is all wonderful, exciting and a testament to the resilient nature of our bodies, minds and spirits.

These 8 months have also taught me the importance of making time for what is important in our lives. It has also taught me to allow my fifteen year old daughter to find her own way while still being the parent she needs.

This week I started just watching the videos for the art classes I have, mainly the videos in Life Book 2018 and stop trying to do every lesson. I watch the videos and think about how I can incorporate some of the techniques into my own artwork. With this in mind I decided to play a bit. One of the questions I like to play around with is how watercolor and acrylic paint can work together.

I love watercolor. I love seeing how watercolor flows on the paper and observe the colors bleed and blend into one another. Unfortunately I didn’t take pictures of the different steps I took on this page:

I did start another one where I am taking pictures which I’ll talk about shortly.

This page started with a background in watercolor. The colors that resulted are what you see in the flowers. I let the page dry completely. The page was overly dark/bright and I knew trying to do any tangles would be difficult to see. I decided to try and tone down areas by applying white acrylic paint. I watered down the white acrylic paint a bit and applied it. When I did, of course, the watercolor reactivated and blended with the acrylic paint. In some places it became muddy. I continued to work leaving some spaces untouched which I planned to make into abstract flowers.

As the mixture of acrylic and watercolor paints started drying I continued applying acrylic paint selecting some other colors, like yellow, orange, and green. In some cases, I mixed some of the colors together, like yellow and green, orange and yellow, sometimes adding white to lighten the colors and adding water when I wanted to thin the paint. Sometimes I would mix it in a bowl and sometimes I would mix it on the page. I continued this process until I had a background I loved and the untouched areas popped more off the page. I let this completely dry.

The next step involved a Uni-ball Signo black pen. This isn’t permanent even when dry but that was okay because I wanted to use water to create some shading effects after I put down the ink. I used the pen to roughly sketch around the watercolor areas that were untouched by the acrylic paint. Then created sketchy stems and leaves. I let the ink dry a bit then took a water brush to the ink. I didn’t want to completely erase the dark lines so I just touched upon the ink enough to cause it to bleed a bit creating some shading. Again I let it dry.

Another “what if” question came up. What if I put watercolor over top of the dry acrylic. I’ve done this before and in some cases it would bead up because it doesn’t absorb into the substrate. The acrylic paint I used was a cheap craft paint called Craft Smart. It leaves an almost chalky appearance and feel which is why I think beading wasn’t a huge issue. Where it did bead up I didn’t mind. I used watercolor to color in the leaves, except for the rare blue ones on the top left flower stem. The bluish leaves are actually an area from the first layer of watercolor background which wasn’t touched by acrylic paint. One of the few places where the paint was a soft pastel color. The color in the rest of the leaves are a result of watercolor on top of the dry acrylic paint. I added watercolor down the stems, at the bottom of the page for grass, in the petals of the flowers, using a variety of colors to create the effect I wanted. I let this dry completely.

Most of these steps done between the drying periods were done before or after work when I had an hour or two. Today, I added just a touch of more watercolor in a few areas just to add some additional shading and a bit more grass on the bottom of the page.

I’m not done with this page yet. I have plans to add some white highlights but I’m waiting for a set of detail brushes I ordered. I am pretty much done with trying to find paint pens that work for fine details. I have gone through several varieties of paint pens, Posca, Painters, Sakura Permapaque, and Craftsmart, just to name a few. All of them have failed me in various ways for what I need when I want to add white details. They either let the background color bleed through them so the white isn’t bright enough, or the tips have issues like leaving blobs of paint where I don’t want it, or they clog or fall out completely. With my strict budget I can’t keep buying products hoping they will work so I’m going to rely on the old faithful brush which can be used with paint and ink.

One of the issues I had when working on this page was at the very start. I added too many different colors for the background which is why in a few areas when I added the watered down acrylic white paint it became muddy. On the page next to the one above I started a new page and decided to limit my colors to yellow, oranges and reds for the first layer. Here is what I have so far:

There is blue around the edge, that came from paint when I was working on a previous page when I failed to put paper towel under the page I was working on. It looks like there is blue in the background of the page but that is actually white. It is untouched by any paint at this point. Interesting that it looks blue in the picture. I kind of like it so after this layer is dry I may try adding some light blue in watercolor.

I tried to go lighter with the watercolors on this page. I get too heavy handed when I work with the Prang watercolors. I love how vibrant they are. As much as I love the vibrancy it is an issue when I want to add any details, plus I want to learn how to get a more pastel effect which is another reason why I’m playing the “what if” strategy with my journal right now.

The rest of my life is also a “what if” sort of game. “What if” I do this or that, or think this or that, or…. and it goes on. I want to understand why life works one way for some people and another way for other people. It is an interesting experiment in both art and life. I entered into Life Book because I felt a need to find a way to heal. Even so, I felt something was still lacking. Don’t get me wrong. I love the lessons. I love what I’m learning. I love that I can use art IN THE MOMENT to release, to let go, and to alter negative into positive. I wanted to expand on this further and this is where I felt the lessons stopped, at least for someone like me who can sometimes have trouble using lessons as a base or foundation and then expanding upon them. It has taken me a while to find what I was looking for but without these lessons and life experiences over the past ten or fifteen years I would not have come up with what I’m experimenting with now.

There are many different processes being shared in the world today. Some of them are about how to become successful, others about how to attract what you desire, or how to be happy and so on. I believe it is important to share all of this with each other. However, as a person who has been trying to find her own way in life, these processes have one thing in common. They work for the person sharing it and may work for others but it doesn’t work for everyone.

I’ve been struggling with understanding why that is. I have come to a sort of conclusion today. It is probably only a partial understanding or conclusion. My conclusion so far is this. Everyone has to understand how they interact and connect with the Universe.

It is very much like working with various artist supplies and tools. What works for one in a certain way doesn’t necessarily mean it will work that way for someone else. To make it work for me, I had to find my connection with the Universe. For some people it is praying. For others it is meditating. For me, it is how I have always seen things with my mind since before I can remember.

I was led to understand this today. I read something that resonated with me, which opened me up to listening to a recording made years ago in which someone was explaining how they understood something. This person is the only person who explained things in the way I understood as well. I know I’m being vague about this. I don’t generally share my beliefs with the world. It isn’t my beliefs that I want to share anyway. The fact that after all these years, and at my age, I have only found one person who has expressed an understanding so very similar to mine is an important thing in and of itself.  It means everyone has their own truth to understand and that truth isn’t the same for everyone. In fact it might be very rare indeed.

What I want to share is this. When I stopped fighting against the Universe and it’s way of interacting with me is when I gain the most understanding. When I stopped fighting against the way art supplies and tools interact with me is when I learn the most about what works for me and what doesn’t. When I leave myself open to the connection I have where information flows and utilize this to explore is when the world changes around me. But more importantly it changes through me first. You can’t change the world around you without first changing something inside of you.

I am a member of a lot of art groups on Facebook. In every single one of them, there are people who ask for set answers to their questions. What is the right product to use for this or that lesson? What is the right pen… What is the right paper… What should I do first… What…. How…. When should I do such and such…. and so on. The questions are good. It is good to question. Don’t ever think I’m criticizing someone for asking questions. I’m not. Some people are limited financially so they need to know what product works best so they aren’t spending money on a product only to find out it doesn’t work and then having to spend more money on another product and so on. I get that.

What I’ve learned over the past couple of years but more importantly what I learned most recently is this. You will always be seeking answers from someone else until something changes inside of you. “What if” there is a knowledge base we are all connected to and that knowledge base is updated from every single person’s conscious and subconscious mind? “What if” we are able to connect to it and by just listening and experimenting with what we hear, we are able to learn everything we ever needed to know? “What if” that connection is different for everyone? For someone, it could be in story telling. For someone else it might be in creating art. For someone else it might be working with numbers. For some it might be prayer, or meditation. Or for others it might be by visualizing a connection to everything and anything.

I don’t know where it comes from but I like the phrase “Fabric of the Universe” or “Fabric of Time”. The use of the word Fabric in both phrases make me visualize the Universe or time as a woven fabric but not as a single layer but multiple layers in all directions. In that fabric everything exists and is connected otherwise it would all fall apart. If one part becomes torn, lost or worn out, it can weaken and cause the rest to start to unravel. This is why it is important for all of us to find that connection, open ourselves up to it and allow knowledge to flow through us and out into the world. When that connection is broken is when we find ourselves fighting, struggling and falling apart. When that connection is made it brings strength and flexibility to the Fabric.

It is amazing to me how allowing creativity into my life is slowly altering my perception of reality. I have read where some artists use acrylics and oils together, two mediums I never thought could work together in one piece of art. If this is possible in art, then what are we capable of in this world if we just stop thinking things are impossible and start playing “what if”?

“What if” I create a force of energy around me that attracts beauty, love, abundance and harmony? “What if” I create a shield which repels hate, anger, toxicity and destruction? “What if”…. fill in the blanks. Find what works for you. Share in the comments, maybe it will spark something in someone else. Nature doesn’t hold back on the “what if”. It doesn’t ask “what if” I mix red and blue. It just does it. It does it so well we see a never ending kaleidoscope of purple hues in this world. Think about that for a moment. If nature or God (depending on your belief) had stopped with the “what if” or limited the “what if” then maybe humans wouldn’t have existed.

Only you can decide if you want to play “what if”…