waiting...gratefully.

So I ordered these pencils.

They're just pencils.  Not even really Fancy Art Pencils(tm) or anything,  Just new pencils, which are always infinitely better than old pencils, even when the old pencils are perfectly fine and pencilly and still make marks on paper, which is what pencils of both varieties are supposed to do.

Despite this fact, I've become a bit obsessed with their delivery.

Or, as the case may be, non-delivery.  The weather on the east coast, with all it's bomb cyclone nonsense, delayed packages, and my pencil pusher is in New York.  So my order is somewhere, probably frozen in a block of ice, and it made me all sad and junk.

To combat this, I decided to be grateful for what I have.

I know.  Not exactly revolutionary stuff, here.  But it's easy to forget: even if there's new stuff, the old stuff still works. 

Sometimes, it even works really well and better than you remember.

I spent last night mucking out simple supplies.  Testing all my brushes to see which ones I like best.  Playing with markers to both make sure they still work and that I still enjoy using them.  Even drawing with old pencils to remember why I was once just as excited to get them as I am for the new ones.

I still can't wait for the new ones to get here.

But in the interim, I'm enjoying what I have.

I should remember that more often.  (Preferably, before I hit "add to cart".)

Sketchbooking #1

(Well, #'s 5 and 6, actually....)

I bought this japanese sketchbook a little over a year ago at the University of Washington bookstore in Seattle on one of my jaunts up thataway.  Because I needed another sketchbook.

Ahem.

And right around this time last year, I decided I wanted to use it rather than just hoard it, as is my natural predilection, and decided to give it a theme.  After tossing around a couple ideas, I decided on "doors".

I finally -- FINALLY -- filled it up a couple days ago.  Apparently, I'm not so inspired by themes as I thought; I let the thing sit, sometimes for months, between drawings, and expanded it to doors, windows, the occasional sign, and door hardware instead of being strictly just doors by the end.  

But it worked, and now volume #5 is completely full of 60 sketches of varying media (mostly watercolor) and varying success (there are a couple that I'd cringe if anyone saw them, but mostly, I like them).

Then there was this book of patterns:

It's huge.  Like, 18" on the long side, huge.

I wanted to make my own patterned stock, with the intention of using them to make covers for inserts for my Midori Traveler's Notebook for this year.  Filled up this giant sketchpad with watercolor patterns over the last month, and finally finished the whole stack on New Year's Day.

From it, I learned that I'm not all that fond of working big, and that an intricate pattern can take longer than an actual drawing to complete.  (And that I'll probably just buy printed stock for my inserts from here on out. :D)

Anyway, that's two more sketchbooks, 100% full, which was the whole point.

Now, I've just got, uh...thirty more or so to go.

(If I don't buy more.)

um.

(I'll probably buy more.  It's an addiction, people.  Paper.  Yum.)

Everyday Everyday: A Thing.

So, I'm kind of doing a Thing.

Like most Things I end up doing, I didn't really mean for it to be A Thing.  

I swear, all my best ideas end up coming about from offhanded stuff.  The stuff I plan meticulously?  Never happens, never catches on with me.  Stuff I come up with at three a.m. and think hey that might be cool, I'll just do it and think about it as I go along, always ends up being awesome.

There's a lesson in there for me, I think.

Anyway, the Thing.

I'm still trying to make sketching an every day habit.  And while I've been doing it quite regularly, I noticed I've been relying a lot on drawing from references.  

Now, there's no shame in that.  Every sketch makes you a better sketcher.  I truly believe that.

But my sketchbooks were starting to look a little, I dunno, sanitized maybe.  Like, "here is my pretty drawing of XYZ", instead of what I really LIKE to look back on, which is the stuff in my life.  When I look back at old sketchbooks, the entries that grab me aren't the well-rendered landscapes or detailed watercolors, even ones that come from my own imagination.

What grabs me are the stupid things.  The empty Dr. Pepper can on my desk in watercolor.  The sketches of my dogs sleeping, even though they look kind of like cookies that someone's only half-baked.  Studies of flowers I've brought in from outside, or drawn while I was out there.

I like to look back on the stuff that's my everyday life.

So I started on May 1st, drawing my everyday life, every day.

They're sketches, and I don't care if they look good, so there's no pressure.  It's just me, a pen, and my life.   Sometimes, that's collections of things.  Sometimes it's more than one drawing on a page.  Sometimes it's an actual story.

But it's all mundane, everyday life, examined closely and recorded.  It's becoming one of my most cherished daily practices.

I'm kind of loving it a little.

Drawing All The Things

A while back, I found this set of Nature Encyclopedias at a thrift shop for less than five bucks for the set.

Of course, they had to come home with me.  I had no real plans for them, but I figured something would come along eventually, even if that was just flipping through them and marvelling at the way we got our info before the internet was invented.

Because National Sketchbook Filling Month is kind of continuing indefinitely, I figured this was an opportunity.

I have blank pages to fill; these things are full of photo references of things I'd like to know more about.  Win-win.

This month, I'm using an A5 (landscape) Strathmore journal for my fill-it-up sketchbook, and I've been blowing through these volumes, drawing four or five things from each one.  It's mostly just my usual pencil-and-watercolor stuff, with a few gouache experiments here and there.  It's been keeping me occupied and my hands moving, and for that, I'm grateful.

A few from this month's play so far:

I'm on volume 4 (of 12), and I'm already about half-way through the book.

Which means this will probably be a longer-than-a-single-sketchbook project, but I'm okay with that.  (Planning on donating the set when I'm done with them, too, so this is both clear-out AND drawing practice.  Bonus score.)

p.s.  I did also "win" NaSkeFiMo last month and filled up the entire Pentalic journal during the month.  I'll see if I can't get a flip-through sometime soonish.  AND I finished the last pages in a journal someone gifted me with in 2014, post-storm, tonight.  Again, I'll see about a flip-through.  It's been interesting to see the evolution of style in the last two years. :)

On Filling Up Sketchbooks in November

So this happened the other day.

I'm still toddling along on my weekly theme schedule, trying to balance action creation with all the culling out I'm doing.  I'm reading an insane number of books, putting collage materials and art supplies in "to sell" boxes, and generally trying to give myself the space to breathe.

Somewhere in there, I thought I might also do NaNoWriMo this year, because I love the sense of community and shared goal, but as it's grown close to November 1, I've been feeling a lot of dread about it.  I write a lot.  Not just on writing weeks, either.  A couple years back, I finished NaNo in four days, if that says anything.

So when my friend Corinne posted the books she's made, and I went through my (totally insane pile of) sketchbooks the other night (there are, I kid you not, about fifty in the queue), I joked that maybe we should all try to fill a sketchbook in November instead.

And #NaSkeFiMo was born.

It's totally informal.  We have a facebook group.  The rules are essentially just PICK A BOOK and FILL THAT SUCKER IN A MONTH.

For some people, a 36 page Field Notes book will be a challenge; for others, one of those hundred-page monstrosities will be more in line.  I figure you know your limits and what will be a challenge for you.  Do that thing.  We'll cheerlead.

Moreover, you don't have to paint or do some kind of fine art.  Write.  Write songs.  Write conversation snippets you overhear and collage in your coffee receipts.  Scribble a map of your neighborhood or journal personally.  Stick down photos or selfies or random color charts.  Experiment.  Play.

It doesn't matter how the pages get filled, just that they get filled.

My plan (subject to change) is to dive headlong into a Stillman & Birn softcover.

I actually filled one of the ring-bound ones in October, so I know it's achievable.  And if I finish early, I may start a second one.  Either a Midori insert (maybe) or one of the kraft paper books, or one of my hand-bound sketchbooks...I don't want to decide too far ahead, but I do know that I won't be hesitant to make it two sketchbooks instead of one if I need to.

I guess my goal is just as many pages as possible, plus two.

Girl's gotta stretch, see.

If you're like me and you've got more sketchbook pages than you have time to use them, you're totally invited to play along.

Come on over and join up.

Let's make beautiful pages together. :)

Big Ol' Catch-Up Post

I'd be sad I didn't get more writing done, but there was this.

The Pacific Northwest in the autumn is amazing, y'all.  And while Wander Week didn't start until today, technically, I'm all about the spirit of the thing versus the letter of it.  My whole purpose for these weekly themed "retreats" is to try and give myself dedicated time to focus on one thing at a time, and to make sure I still have a breadth of exposure to the things I love doing.

And if I'd missed this, I'd have missed something I love.  I need more experiences (thus, the focus weeks), not fewer.  So this.  This, this, this.

I decided to head up the mountain one day on a whim, and ended up hiking by an insane drop-off into that river valley below, surrounded by giant Noble Firs and patches of wild carrot.  I sat on a log by the beach at Coldwater Lake and drew the path.  I logged an insane number of fitbit steps.  :D

I wandered.  I invoked the spirit of Walt Whitman and Thoreau (and probably a little Bill Bryson, because it is me we're talking about here), and gallivanted off into the wild.

I loved every minute of it, too.

I also read all of the writing-related books in the house, save a half-dozen that I put aside for next time.  The rest are being passed on to new homes, because the Giant Declutter is still A Thing(tm) around here.

So this week was Art Week.

I did a few things over the past couple weeks.  (A few things that have all but filled a sketchbook, which I'm calling a huge victory.)

*  I've been touristing in my hometown, practicing some things I read about in some urban sketching books.

*  I've been participating peripherally in #worldwatercolorday's monthly challenge, which was kind of summery-themed this month.  (Lots of seaside topics, which is totally cool with me...it just seems a little more July than September to me.) 

*  I even tried to make my own watercolor paint.  I already had the glycerine and gum arabic, and after remembering that eye shadow is essentially just pigment and binder, I crushed up a couple shadows and went for it.  And it worked!  Not the best saturation (while it's pigment, eye shadow is pretty diluted so it doesn't kill your eyes), and way more sparkle than I usually look for in a paint, but it totally worked.  I'm trying not to go insane and buy pigment to play with.  The struggle is real.

I also read through the last of the art books that I'm getting rid of.  (Which is all of them, save seven -- one on anatomy, one on botanical illustration, two on urban sketching, one on sacred geometry, one on keeping a nature journal, and the Laws Guide to Nature Drawing.)  The ones left over are foci for upcoming Art Weeks.  It's nice to have a focus and not feel so overwhelmed with the possibilities, I have to say.

Technically, wander week starts today.

I'm planning on going out today and drawing more things, if the weather holds.  (It's threatening to rain as I write this.)  My friend Laurie, of Glitterfoot Studios, is heading up to hang out and be all creative and junk together.

But most of this week is the final book push.  I've got a small stack of ecology-related/wander-y type things/transcendentalist lit still sitting here that my brain refuses to let go of until I've at least speed-read through them.  

(For the record, once that's done, I've got fiction left in the house, and a scarily small pile of nonfic that I still want to get to.  And I'm done.  I've completely cleared almost a dozen shelves, not including the art supply shelves.  Not even kidding.  It's crazy.)

And maybe -- just maybe -- I can get back onto a mountain somewhere before the snow flies, too.

Art week addendum: buckling paper

Stolen shamelessly from Blick, obviously.

So I just read something interesting and had to share.

When you use wet media on something, and the paper goes all wavy?  That has a name.

It's called "cockling".

Yes, it sounds like a baby rooster.  But it's actually science.

See, the way they make paper is this:

Fibers of various kinds -- tree pulp, cotton, linen, other stuff -- are mulched and pulped and essentially shredded into individual fibery bits.  Those are flattened out into exceedingly thin, flat, even layers.

Those layers are then stuck together with some kind of glue into thicker sheets, and then dried.  How they're dried determines the finish.  Cold press is, y'know, cold pressed on big drums.  Hot press is essentially ironed into having that super-smooth texture with very hot drums.

(I'm assuming rough is created by bored wizards between spelling cows to fly or whatever they do.)

All of that is the finish, but the main bit -- the fiber layers -- are the same for everything.

Some have sizing in them, which keeps the paper from eating water like a hungry sponge, too.  In fact, the sizing is what separates watercolor paper from, say, a cheap dimestore notebook's finish.

So then, it gets to you, and you put watery stuff on these fiber layers.

And here's where the magic happens.

All those fibers in there, which have been nestled neatly together in organized rows, are reactive to water.  If you've ever seen a wooden window frame when the rain gets in, you'll know what happens to plant fibers that get wet: they swell.  And these fibers are no different.

Imagine for a second that you glued together about a hundred of those Grow Your Own Insects into a flat sheet shape.  (You know the ones.  The ones that come in a capsule and you put them in a glass of water, and in an hour, you have this huge super cockroach or something that's 100x the size of the original capsule.)

Or a boyfriend, apparently.

If you dunked a strip in the middle of the group into water, in about an hour, you'd have a strip of giant insects, with the other, un-wet toys still their original size.  It would not even remotely be flat anymore.

This is what cockling looks like, only much, much smaller.  

The wet fibers suck up water and expand, which soaks out into the fibers next to the originals, which also expand.  They push outward, but are still constrained by the glue between layers and the dry, more rigid bits at the edge.  They grow into kind of a cup shape, creating valleys made of expanded fibers in various stages of expansion.  The dry parts are pushed up into peaks.

Voila.  You have wavy, not-at-all-flat, cockled pages.

Personally, I don't mind wavy papers in my journals.  Means I worked on those pages and I get a little prideful about finished pages.  Some of my journals have pages that are so cockled that the book puffs open like a fan, barely able to be contained by mere binding anymore, even.

If you want to avoid cockling on bound pages, you need books with thicker papers.  The finish doesn't matter as much as the thickness for this issue -- all papers of all finishes will react similarly with exposure to water.  The degree to which this happens depends on the thickness of the underlying number of layers, which prevent the swelling from taking the whole page with it when it goes rogue.

For unbound sheets, stretching your paper in advance will take out most of the problem, since the WHOLE page is wet down at once, and then flattened out and left to dry evenly across the surface.  Since the fibers are dried with some room between them that way, the water expansion won't affect the neighboring fibers as easily, and you won't get the ripply bits.

Blick has a good youtube video on stretching watercolor paper, if you're interested.

Science, man.  It's awesome.

Art Week - A Dilemma and a Plea: On Hoarding

A friend of mine mentioned her dilemma on Facebook.

And since I've known her forever, I'm totally throwing her under the bus here.  Not because her dilemma is unusual, but because I hear it all the time.

In fact, I've lived this problem.

Z said that she buys all the things, but is then too afraid to use them for some reason.

Oh, girl.  I hear you.

For me, that fear falls into a few different reason categories:

1. I spent a lot of money on them, so they're now "precious".  If I use them up, I'll have to spend more money on more of them.  
2. I'm just going to mess them up.  I don't feel like I'm worthy of using such precious, beautiful, pristine things to slop around with my negligible skills, or just for practice.  I should save them for when I know how to draw better/use the medium better/won't be wasting them.
3. I don't have the time to use them.  I have other things I do much more often, and I bought these things largely as an aspirational piece, because I see what other artists are doing and want to do that, too, or because I think that if I own all the things, I can automagically do all the things.

They're all perfectly good reasons/excuses.  They've all got a valid basis, really.  

But here's the thing I want to beg you to do, folks:  USE THEM ANYWAY.

Yes, they were expensive.  But I'm here to tell you: most art supplies aren't used up in a day.  Or a week.  In some cases, years worth of use.  Up 'til the tornado ate them, I had certain supplies that I had for more than a decade.  And those are supplies that I regularly used.

And now?   I have, say, watercolor tubes that I bought two years ago, use literally all the time, and haven't even made a dent in.  I'm using them up, for sure.  But the incremental use is so tiny that I'd need to literally stop sleeping and do nothing but paint with that color to use it up soon enough for it to be a problem.

Obviously, some things are more easily consumed than others.  Pens will run out.  Markers will get used up.  Books get full.  But if you're like me, those pens and markers are more likely to dry up than get used to death, and I'm probably going to buy more supplies anyway because shiny.  The chances of me reaching the bottom of the art supply pile and not having anything but a stick and some mud with which to draw on the side of the house is so laughable that I'd guffaw out loud...if the pile of drawing pens wouldn't fall over and crush me if I moved that much.

When you don't use them for fear of scarcity, you're not letting them do what they were created to do.  They were made to make marks, hold words and pictures, and flood color onto a surface.  They were not made to live in your drawer.  You're cockblocking your art supplies, and by proxy, your creativity.

Yes, you're going to mess some things up.  That's how learning works.  You make a whole lot of crap before you make things you like looking at.  It's called practice for a reason -- you have to make practice (n) a practice (v) to get from here to there.

And since the materials you're using are kind of integral to the thing you're practicing, you have to use those materials in order to learn how to...uh...use the materials.  It's sort of circular, there, but it's true:  practicing with inferior materials won't teach you how to use the thing you're hoarding.  It'll teach you how to work with inferior materials.  Or, worse, if you don't practice at all, you won't learn how to use ANY materials.

Why did you buy them again?  TO USE THEM.  So do that.  Your practice is important.  The crap you think you're producing is an important step.  You're so worth it. 

Yes, things take time.  It's kind of how time works.

Funny thing is:  whether you take that time to actually use your stuff or take that time to stare at the television fretting about not using that stuff -- the time's still spent.  Might as well use it on the good stuff.

Which brings me to the only reason I'll ever advocate for ditching things: the crowd.

The stuff you bought because XYZ artist uses it and you thought you needed it, but you tried and hated it for your own artmaking?

Throw that nonsense out.  Or better, donate it.

Either way, life's too short to spend mental energy making excuses for stuff you've tested and don't like using.  There are way too many areas we all have to deal with in this life that are unpleasant...your artmaking shouldn't be one of them.

The same with stuff you might want to learn how to do someday.

Either try it, love it, and use it...or try it, hate it, and ditch it.

Those are the options.

Stuff that sits in a drawer isn't art.

It isn't doing you any good.  It's not a magic wand that will spontaneously create works of staggering genius when you're not looking.

You have to use them.  You have to give them direction.  You have to use them as the tools they are to practice your way into skill.

They won't bite.  Or won't bite that hard, at least.

Go.  Make something.  The world needs your voice and your vision.  Use your tools, and make that happen.

Hijacked!

Because of the aforementioned head gasket,

things around here have been a little scrambly.  J's been taking extra shifts at work, and I've been kicking it into gear with the letting go of artworks that I've been holding onto.

(Most artists can tell you -- there's a time in the process where you're really too close to the thing to see it objectively.  It's your baby.  You made that.  And that holding on phase can last a while.  It does, eventually, end, and you can show or sell it at that point, but before that...it's like taking a too-small child somewhere and leaving him for the first time.  Seriously.)

I have a whole bunch of very large canvases that I've done in the past couple years.  For some reason, the big ones mean more to me.  I didn't do them with the intent of selling them, really -- they were more for me, which means they're more personally meaningful of course, but also that attachment thing has been stronger with them, too.

But lately, even before the gasket of doom, I've been feeling like it might be time.

One thing this retreat schedule's taught me is that I need space to focus.  Too much clutter -- physical, mental, or otherwise -- and the weight of the possibilities starts to drag me down.  

I need space to stretch.  Empty places where I can rest my eyes and my cup of coffee.  Where my attention isn't torn into fifty directions.

After all, stuff is energy.  It demands you pay attention to it, to care for it, to let it live up to what it's supposed to be doing with itself.  You can't give it that kind of attention if you can't even remember what all of it is, even.

And these big paintings have been behind my couch for safekeeping for a long time.  That's a lot of stuck energy.

So I decided to un-stick it.

I'm listing them slowly, because I'm giving them an extra coat of UV varnish and touching up the edges on each one.  (Also because every time I touch one, I'm all like but I love this one, despite the fact that I'm saying that to every single one of them, and my house doesn't have that much wall space.

Let go.

Let go.

Let go.

Check them out if you're looking for art.  Or you just want to adopt an overly-coddled baby canvas.  Or you want me to come to your house.

(Well, if you're in Seattle, Portland, or points inbetween, that is.  If you buy a big one, there's a discount for hand delivery or for local pickup.  Shipping big paintings is kind of a production number, and I worry about them in transit sometimes.  So, yep.  I'll bring them to you.  I'm just that kind of midwife.)

And y'know what all of this has to do with writing week?  Not a thing.  I've been hijacked by the letting go-ness of it all.
As soon as these are photographed, I'll be writing again.  I'm listening to a lot of writing classes/books, but that's not writing itself.  

Sooooon.  SOOOOON.

ARW Days 1 and 2: Preparation-ish

My thought was to try and complete my big ol' SRII* journal.

My heart was in the right place.

However, my heart seems to have forgotten two things:

1. Paint does not dry instantly.
   Not even in 90-degree heat.  At least, not when there's also 80+% humidity.  The paint just sits there in a pool, fanning its face, and laughing at you behind its perfectly manicured hand.  Paint is sloooooow sometimes.
2. There are a lot of pages in that book.
   Seriously.  The thing's, like, two inches thick.  There are more than two hundred pages.  I can do two about every fifteen minutes, even WITH a fan and a heat gun helping me, without having the pages go all mind-meld on each other.  Which means that after working for two days on them pretty much solidly....?  I've done maybe fifty backgrounds.

Let us just say that this is slower and less productive than I'd like.  

I'm probably going to lay off the painting for the rest of this week and just concentrate on filling the pages of a different practice journal.  Read some books and do some exercises instead.  Maybe paint a page or two every time I'm over there near the desk by the acrylic paints, but....no.  

Of course, this means that the retreat week is doing exactly what I wanted it to do:  to show me what's possible in a week.

I think I'm going to end up finding that I can draw/watercolor more practice pages than I can more formal or more collagey pages.  I'm generally much slower at that kind of artwork anyway -- it's not really my natural inclination, but I love the finished result so much that I do it regardless.

So I've got three books set aside, and a whole whack of classes I can work through if I want to tomorrow (if I don't end up finally heading to the Fair to draw prize-winning cows and such).  

Oh, and I had a big Happy today when I finally figured out how my overhead camera thing works.

Now I just have to figure out how my *camera* works for video, and how to edit said video, and I'm gonna be able to let you see exactly what I'm doing on art weeks.  I expect the first few to kind of suck, but I'll probably be super-proud of them anyway.  Sorry in advance for any squealing you might have to listen to.  I'm gonna feel like Spielberg even if the camera jumps around more than a caffeine-addicted kangaroo.

*SRII

A few years back, I took Melody Ross's Soul Restoration II class (which I think she's changed the name of now, to Life Restoration).  One of the activities is building a book, separated into sections, kind of like a book-bound vision board in six or eight different categories.  

That book is one of my favorite possessions.  It's broken, dirty, and smells like tornado.  Pieces of muddy corn fall out of it when I open it.  Some parts are really damaged.  I don't care.  I keep it anyway.

Some of it, though, is a little dated now.  My perspective's different from how it was five years ago.  There are different things I want.  Fewer things.  More important things to me.

So my thought was to do another book, which is exactly what I'm doing.

(I just forgot how long it took me to paint the backgrounds last time, and they were much smaller sections with that one.  Hooboy.  Long-term project, it is.)

Mailing Things to Strangers

It all started with a mail art call.

The Bathtub Art Museum, currently of Portland, OR, but moving soon to Texas, is holding a final mail art call: anything Portland-ish goes, provided there's a bathtub somewhere in the design.  I used to love mail art -- amusing my mailpeople with the interesting deliveries and mailing things off to be a part of something fun.

So I dug out a pack of blank watercolor postcards and decided to play along.

And it was totally fun.

Fun enough, that I hunted up one of my old mail art/penpal online haunts and decided to send a few more.  Just because.

(The postcard blanks, by the way, sucked.  Normally, I'm a "don't review the things you don't like; there's enough negativity in the world" person, but this bears mentioning: avoid ProArt's 140# cold press watercolor postcards.  There's no way this stuff is watercolor paper. Color just soaks right in without any movement, and if you go over an area with more than one wash in an attempt to fix the horrible absorption, the paper balls up instantly.  I'm only using this pack for collage from here on out, and even then, only after gessoing the surface first.  Strathmore's cards are about a gazillion times better, and only about $.30 more per pack.)

Despite substrate frustration, it was beyond fun to send these things out.  

And because I like fun stuff, I've been doing it every postal day since.  Mailing out some little sketchy bit to strangers is way more satisfying than an email, and it's giving me some practice and materials playtime, too.  Bonus score.

Today, I'm getting the last of the lists finalized for the #tornadobook mailout.

Signups close up tonight at midnight-ish (though I can probably fit you in last-minute, if you're still on the fence -- just send a message through the "contact" link up there at the top of the page), and I'm putting themes to each of the books today, too.  I'm hoping to mail them out on the new moon on the 8th, to give me time to get my pages done and dried, everything packaged and ready to go, and to confirm with all the participants.  Pictures forthcoming, once I get 'em all in the mail.

After that, I have another proposition for you.

All of these postcards are currently going to abject strangers.  I'm literally using the "random address" feature on sendsomething.net to find US addresses for people I wouldn't know from Adam.

And while that's freeing, creatively (no pressure!), I think I'm going to start being a little more deliberate for the rest of the month-ish, too.  (#VAGUEBOOKING without the BOOK, here, clearly. :D)

Check back on Thursday.  

(::cue up the Mysterious Music::)

Leo Moon

Hali Karla released the new prompt for this month.

(It's a two-parter, and it's best if you do some creating around the first part before you know the second bit, which will do a 180 to your perception in about a second flat.)

I've been hibernating for the past few days, painting and drawing and walking the dogs in the uncharacteristic sunshine we've been having, sometimes for hours each day.  And one of the things I've been doing by way of stretching is trying to annoy myself in my notebooks.

I don't mean actually annoy myself.  But I've been giving myself restrictions.  No looking at the page while you're drawing it.  Use no photo references.  Use a color you hate.  That kind of thing.

Today, it's use only what you have within a 1' radius from your chair.  Which was, literally, one Marks-All pencil, one jar of rewettable water-soluble graphite in blue, some white paint, and a brush that's completely inappropriate for detail work.

Challenge accepted, I guess. :)

I'm off to go back into my cave for a bit and do some contemplation for the second half of the prompt.  It fits in, oddly well, with some stuff I've got on tap for later this year...because synchronicity really is A Thing.

15-19/30-in-30

Just a quick check-in/drive-by arting:

I've finished ten of the stack of undone canvases so far.  I'm working on a few more tonight/this (early) morning, and hoping to finish another ten before Monday.

Of those, these are my favorites so far.  I Am The Night, Rabbit Rising, The Professor, You Can't Go Home Again, and Bask.

They all have stories.  Because they always do.  I'll post them, eventually.

For now, it's about finishing. (Thanks, Mercury retrograde!)

Not So Secret Shame, and 12/30 Breakup Perks

Everybody has one.

Some kind of secret shame that they don't want anyone to see.  Something that bugs them, but not bad enough to, y'know, change it or anything, just enough to kind of hope that visitors don't notice.

This is mine.

Over the past six months or so, I've amassed a pretty huge stack of things in progress.  Which, really, given that I do that a lot in every other area of my life, shouldn't be that surprising, but the volume of said stack is pretty gnarly, even for me.

See, my process is sort of non-linear.  When I'm not feeling particularly detail-oriented, or I just can't think of what to do next with a canvas, I can often set it aside, work on a first layer or two of something else, and come back to the problem child later, with fresh eyes.  Most of the time, that'll fix it.  It's only in a small percentage of things does it not work.

So when I'm producing a whole ton of work, like I have in the past six months or so, the actual numbers with those percentages goes right through the roof.  Ten percent of ten may only be a stray canvas, but ten percent of a hundred is a giant freakin' stack.  Like this one.  And like its friends, the other two stacks like this.

My goal, then, is to work through the problem children for the rest of this month.

It's a slower process, and can be a little frustrating, and sometimes the solution to the problem is to take a really big brush and some nice, opaque paint and paint all the way over it, but when there's this much backlog...it's time.

Which leads us to today's Finishing Of The Canvases:

12/30
Breakup Perks
6x6" 

Joyce, the monster of mismatched socks, wasn't sure what to do with herself now that she and her longtime boyfriend broke up.  All she really wanted to do was sit around and mope, an urge she indulged quite often.  But now, on day six post-that guy, she was discovering that the free reign she was suddenly afforded wasn't all that bad.  She could sleep on the whole bed.  She didn't have to check in with anybody.  She could order pizza with anchovies if she wanted to, since there was nobody else's preferences to consider.

And nobody questioned her when she binged on giant shrimp and beer for breakfast, either.

She'd be okay.

New Moon in Capricorn

Some of you probably already know that last year, I found my biological family.

It was one of those completely unexpected things.  I did one of those DNA tests where you spit in a vial and six weeks later, they tell you if you have to wear green on St. Patrick's Day. (Which, incidentally, I totally do.)  I expected a nice breakdown of where my genes have gallivanted around to before they got to me, and that's all.

Instead, I found seven siblings.  Turns out my biological mother was prolific, boyhowdy.

(And I'm still the bossy eldest, which probably surprises precisely no one who knows me.)

Unfortunately, I just missed meeting my mother.  She passed in 2012.  I've got stories and pictures, though, and that's a hundred percent more than I had before.

Hali Karla is doing a monthly challenge this year, based on the new moons.

This month, the new moon is in Capricorn.  She describes it as:

it’s kind of about initiating change in things that already have a foundation set in place. What needs tending, shifting, fluffing, loving? So new beginnings for strengths and structures in-waiting.

...and she asked us to think about a dedication of our practice to someone.

It flashed in my head that all of a sudden, I have a foundation.  I actually have a family tree that doesn't begin and end with me now.  (And I actually kind of have this weird family bush that angles out in all kinds of crazy tendrils, no less.  You wouldn't expect me to have any kind of normalcy in my lineage, would you?)

So I dug out one of the pictures I have of my mother.  I'm clearly not a portrait painter, so this kind of has vague shades of her around the edges, but I know who it is.

And this year, my practice is for the woman that gave me not only life, but seven wonderful people to share it with.

(She really did have eyes, by the way.  She was just smiling in this picture and her eyes were all squinched up.)

Let the practice begin.

10/30 Yesterday

10/30
Yesterday
6x6"

Yesterday, Rocket had a forever home.  That, however, was before his human went somewhere and didn't come home.  All the people who'd come into his home since then had pet him and loved on him and looked at him with sad eyes, but even when Rocket asked as nicely as he knew how, none of them could tell him where his human had gone.  One of them said she would take him with her, now that her dad had passed, whatever that meant, and Rocket was glad for the company.  He'd go with her until his own human came back, though he was getting a panicky feeling that maybe he wouldn't be back, though he couldn't tell exactly why.

When she let him out into the yard one more time, he worried it might be the last.  So he stood at his sentinel spot in the back corner, where he could see both approaching sidewalks, and looked hard, just in case they'd missed his human, but no familiar faces approached.  He perked up his  ears, the one his human had said was goofy and always flopped up over his head like a particularly unfortunate hat, but there were no familiar sounds.

Still, yesterday had been a normal day.  And here, it still smelled like yesterday.

He'd stay for just a little while longer.

Just in case.

7/30 WILD

Technically, I guess, this doesn't really fall under the 30 in 30.  It does, since I finished it tonight.  But it got its start about a month ago.

She started out as a largely pink and yellow field.  I'd challenged myself to not use my favorite (read: big) brushes, despite the fact that this is a much bigger canvas than I'm using most often.  (It's 16x20", rather than the 6x6" that I've been working with primarily.)  I had a small (size 2) brush, and as elements came forward, I tried to just keep it to expressive strokes, rather than worrying all the lines, as I'm prone to do.

This is also much more color than I'm used to.  I'm fond of darker, less bright colors.  More muted than in your face, so every time I wanted to grab something grey, I grabbed another bright color intead.  It wasn't until the black and white settled things down a little that I started liking it, but I'm still glad I let the color not just sing, but shout like its head was on fire.

Also, I'm finally going through all my lessons for Diane Culhane's Paint Your Garden class, so there's lots of scratchings and pencil sgraffito and pontillism-style dots, some of which were eventually covered, but which really add a texture I wouldn't have had otherwise.

And despite all the departures from my usual process (which is why it sat, sometimes for a week at a time, with nothing getting done), I think it still manages to look like me, so I'm okay with it all.  I even really like it, truth be told.

There's something magical happening by painting every day.

I'm glad I'm on board for it.

7/30
WILD

(16x20" on canvas)

ignore the messy desk -- painting every day does have its downside. :)

Simple Animals

A while back, I picked up the book Craft-A-Doodle, edited by Jenny Doh.  It's a compilation of about a zillion different artists, all giving examples of their own work, along with techniques to try.

In it, Carla Sonheim¹ showed her technique for using Sharpie markers on cardboard.  It seems pretty straightforward, right up until she uses a white oil pastel to scribble over big black areas...and they turn blue right in front of your eyes.  It's like magic, folks.  Seriously.

See?  Magic.

Last night, this was both a fun exercise for me, and a reminder of my Stuff Manifesto.  With just three things -- a sharpie, a pastel, and some cardboard -- you can make really nifty stuff.  You don't need to drop a load of money to practice, and even in practice, you can make good stuff.

(Granted, then I dropped a wad of cash at Blick because of a sale on markers and canvases, but those were wants, not needs.)  :)

Make what you can, with what you have.  Make all the things.  Practice and play.

That's really what it's all about.

1)  by the way, if you ever have a chance to take a class with Carla, do it.  Everything I've ever taken by her has been amazing, accessible, and has never failed to teach me a whole slew of new things.  She's amazing.

06/30 Trade?

06/30
Trade?

5x7" on canvas board.

I'll give you my heart for this radish.

or a banana.  Dinosaurs like bananas.

4/30 Vile Wizardry

4/40
Vile Wizardry

After fleeing at top speed for more than half an hour, Jack found that the wicked creature was still in close pursuit, undeterred by his flight. He vowed to find the cause of this vile wizardry and to end the pink, squeaky reign of terror, if he did so with his last breath.

To be fair, the pink balloon's alias was "The Helium-Filled Death Monkey", so....