Art therapy

I'm all over the place this week.... a million things on my mind, so I can't really concentrate on anything. The best way I found to deal with it today?

Phonebook faces drawn repeatedly on many, many pages with your non-dominant hand à la Katie Kendrick. It felt so good to not really think, and just go through the movements of making marks. These are now in my journal and will probably be altered in the future, but for now - they were like medicine.

And just for fun - a little watercolor guy saying "HI".

Random show & tell

This is what I see when I open the door to our backyard - gray, gray sky and pink flowers. It has been constantly raining for days... and as much as I love rain, I am getting a bit tired of it.

I have been playing with simple color combinations and making decorative paper that I'll tear and collage in my journal. This one made me happy.

This one too.

And these are three pogo prints. It is so easy to create effects in photoshop and alter the image any way you want to, but for some reason playing with different techniques of distressing pogo prints makes me excited. For the first one I used acetone and sand paper, second one was soaked and burned and I forgot what I did with the third one. Fun!

I have been commissioned to paint a 72" x 36" painting, which is pretty big... To try it out, I painted on three 9x12" canvas boards. That was easy, but painting it on big canvases will be challenging for sure.

Speaking of big surfaces and commissions, I don't think I shared this image:

It doesn't look like much on the photo, but I was really proud how it turned out. There were many glazes od different greens and I liked it. It's hanging somewhere in New York now...

I'll stop my random chatter now... my dh will be back home soon and I think we'll light a fire and open a bottle of wine (or make tea) and chase the gray away.

What would you choose - a glas of wine or tea on a cold evening?

xo

101 BIRDS - Painting #15

 It is a very gloomy, rainy day and I'm not feeling the best, so only colorful art would do.
The saturated, happy colors give me energy. 

Many journal pages

I am working busily in my journal every day, just as I said I would. All my other journals have paintings, maybe a quote or found poem, but no real writing. Here, I am writing a lot, which complicates the blog showing part, because I want to write freely, without judgement and yet - the show-off part of me wants to present them here. 

 See the arrow in the above picture? It points to my first ever hand cut number stamps! Carving them made me ridiculously happy... and I love them in all their imperfect glory.

The following spread started as a quick painting inspired by a photo of two cats, and then came the writing, and the fish.... and now I can't paint over it because I like the background so much that I want to keep it that way. The good thing is that there are many more pages in the journal, so I can do just that, and maybe write over it one day if I get bored of the 'empty' space.

The art part of the journal workshop is easy and fun and I could do it constantly. The written assignments not so much... I promised myself that I will do them, and I am, no matter how uncomfortable they make me feel. I realized that I spend many hours not wanting to do them, procrastinating as much as I can, and yet - when I start to write, I can't seem to stop. So, my guess is that it really is good for me, just as Judy Wise says. 

 See.... a LOT of writing!

And then some more...  The videos and very unusual prompts are posted daily, and as much as I try, I am not keeping up with them. Maybe if I stop procrastinating, and actually start writing now, maybe I'll get there. It is really a lot of fun and brings me a ton of joy. Can't help but wonder if I will fill the journal, or get tired of it after a while and move to something else... We'll see...

More to come...

Elena and her companions

I felt very unhappy with myself after I finished this sculpture. I started it too late in the day, not expecting that the process will be so time consuming. I don't know why I thought that it would be easy.

 Being that I don't have much experience with paper clay, I wasn't sure if it would stay pliable over night (I thought of putting it in a zip-lock bag), so I did my best to finish it as much as I could and went to sleep.

 And, as it often happens, when we get some distance from our work and look at it with fresh eyes - things change. Well, not always... but sometimes they really do. So when I saw her the next morning my disappointment vanished and for some reason my mood toward her changed. I decided that for a first try, she really isn't that bad and we had a fun photoshoot together.

Lessons learned:

1. Don't expect to do something perfectly the first time.

2. Don't rush it. Give yourself time.

3. Don't judge yourself to harshly.

4. Enjoy the process.

5. Repeat.

101 BIRDS - Painting #14

I have travel on my mind, so bird #14 reflects it... The weather is still pretty much like in this painting (plus wind). Waiting for the sun...

My new journal

 For years I have admired photos of Judy Wise's journals... I think that the way she mixes writing, collage, painting and puts it all in one book is amazing. I jumped to the opportunity to see how she works and signed up for her online journaling class.

Usually I like to watch how other artists paint and don't participate much, but this time I am very inspired and ready to work through all the prompts and exercises. And because none of my 65 ongoing journals would work, I started by making a brand new one, and filled it with watercolor paper.

We have had rain for days, and it is really dark, so I none of my photos do justice to the journal (the colors are all wrong). I used encaustic medium for most of the cover (the birds are covered with something else, so they have a different texture). I can't get over the wonderful tactile part of it... I just want to keep looking at it and touching the surface, which might trigger me into exploring encaustics some more...

I know what I'll be doing tomorrow... splashing color and words in it :-)

Have a happy weekend!