Art 101 Week 4.........Felt Tips

 

Week 4 and I am still going strong!!!

I have to say I am quite proud of myself for showing up everyday and doing the work.

As much as I love making art and being creative, sometimes I do forget to give myself the time to do it and this community has only made me want to show up everyday.  And I can feel my confidence growing in my work and my fear of showing what I do and being good enough, slipping away!!!

This week was all about using felt tip markers in our journals and using line to express our feelings in our drawings.

Above is my collection of markers that I have gathered over the years.  I love them all and they all add something a little different to my pages.

Following Jules tutorial on Expressive lines I did two drawings of "myself" and used lines to try and express an emotion.  A very simple and understated entry for me but I loved it!!!!!!

Another prompt I followed was " Your Life in Lines", illustrate your life in lines.

As will be painfully obvious in these drawings, I am NOT an illustrator!!!! But I sure would love to be.  It was so much fun recording a few little bits of a day for me in illustrated drawings.  I think if nothing else, I have at least come up with an illustration that shall represent "me".  I like my gal and have fun dressing her in stripes and florals.

I decided to try using the line sketching technique to sketch faces.  So, rather than drawing faces in a continuous drawing action, I did more of a true sketch with quickly placing lines down.  I looked at drawings by artist Lewis Rossignol and tried to recreate his syle using this technique.  While my sketches don't look any thing like his, I love how they turned out and am going to keep working at this.  Here are a few I drew in my little sketch book.

The one below was a quick sketch I did of a guy that was on television at the time I was sitting and sketching.  I do better when I have a drawing to look at rather than a moving target, hahaha.

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And lastly, my wonderful new friend Sasha had the great idea to play a game with all of us interested in the Get Messy Community.  She started by giving a prompt on instagram and someone would take that prompt and then leave a prompt for the next person.  The prompt I took was "add a face to your page" and the prompt I left for the next person was "paint with a color you don't like."  I was apparently feeling a different side to my creating and this poor jumbled soul is was appeared on my page.  I have had my lovely niece and her fiance visiting with us all weekend so I grabbed a few minutes to do this while they were napping.

SHE

She made things.

She made boundaries.

She did her best to enjoy.

She came to terms with her limitations.

I have again truly enjoyed these past 4 weeks of showing up daily to work in my journal.  I cannot wait to see how this year unfolds in my art and then to surround myself with all the juicy, full journals I have at the end of the year!!!!!

Have a great week everyone and thanks for stopping by!!!

Getting Back to What I Love

Oh these months of September, October, November, December and January........funny how two major life events can put a real wrench in how you feel about 5 months in a year.  That's almost half of a year that I allow myself to be super sad and un-motivated to get out and live life.  What a waste of a perfectly great and full-of-possibilities life, wouldn't you say?

My mom and dad would be sooooooooo disappointed in me.  So, with the 4 year anniversary of my mom's death arriving tomorrow, Halloween, I have decided to not post tomorrow with my typical style of post.  Instead, I shall post today and share my art journaling and sketchbook entries of the past week.  I have always had a tendency to only go to my art in times of sadness and desperation.  A way of helping me to work through horrible, difficult times when I can not find any other healthy way of coping with the feelings and thoughts racing through my overly busy mind.  The end result being art that I love but that is not necessarily so happy to go back and look at later on.  So with that being said and made aware to me, I am turning to my art to represent my feelings everyday, not just the bad days and or months.  It may not be nearly as interesting, but it will at least better represent my life which is actually full of many, many happy and super joyful days!!!  Especially now that I have my youngest living with me full time and have his wacky spirit filling my home with even more laughter and joy, not to mention beautiful music when he is playing on his drums.

My art will still help me through the tougher days, but maybe they won't seem so tough if I have been expressing myself everyday through my art.  Grief is a crazy emotion that really just seems to get a tight grip on me when I indulge in it.  At one moment I may think I have a grasp on it and then some stupid episode on a tv show will send me right over the edge or a song or some unfortunate event in the life of someone I barely know.  I have a dear friend who just lost her sister-in-law to cancer.  This beautiful soul leaves behind 3 precious, really young children and a loving husband along with many other family members and friends.  Those 3 young children have lost their MOM at a horribly young age.  I was so blessed to have my mom in my life for 46 years and I can barely stand to think of her not being here anymore.  But then I think about those 3 children and wonder how I can be so selfish to be allowing myself to feel so sorry for myself when I was given the gift of 46 years with my mom and 49 years with my dad.  It really puts a new perspective on how I see my situation.  

Okay, so anyway, back to my happy thoughts.  Here are some photos of my newest journal/sketchbook entries. There is no consistency to what they look like.  My style changes based on what artist I am studying and what classes I am taking on-line.  The only time "my" style shows up is when I don't look at any videos and just sit down and try to create an entry on my own.  I really struggle with this which is why I am always taking classes and watching what other's techniques are.  My hope is that if I make daily entries a priority then my own style will emerge and find itself.  In the mean time, I am having great fun and that is a priority for me right now :)  

Stabilo Pencil and water

My alter ego......Poulet Chateau and her best chick, Beatrice Feathers.

(above and below)

A moment in a day of the life of Poulet.

Still needs to have some color added to it, or, maybe not.

Some wonderful snail-mail that inspired my first entry in a new journal..... a gratitude page.

A wooden board rescued from my dad's workshop last year gets a few flowers and a stamped bird.

A very inexpensive mixed media journal gets a special cover to make it prettier. Vintage bark cloth and recycled ribbon from a gift make for a perfect altered journal cover.

A class taught by Pam Garrison on Creativebug led to this entry.  Using a pen to make blind marks on a page, then going back and adding color into those shapes (above).  Then going back in with the pen and adding in what you see (below).  It took me some time to really just slow down and stare, but then I started to see the images.  Super cool exercise and every time you get a different result.  Loved this and did multiple pages of this technique.

Not particularly so great to look at, but I had fun with it.......laying down the background colors with acrylic paints and then just doodling some of my favorite things......birds and flowers and a few words that pop into my head.  No real rhyme or reason to this.

Taking cues from Mary Ann Moss and Pam Garrison I tried my hand at just sketching what is right in front of me or just my surroundings.  This was fun but I have no sense of proportion or really making things look 3 dimensional.  But hey, practice makes perfect right?  And I do like how things look when I do this and I have never been much of a "realist" at drawing for certain.

This one will get some color added to it some time today.  

This is a pretty typical style for me when I am doing more journaling than actual "art journaling".  Okay but kind of blah.  Hoping to add some depth and direction over time as I make this more of a daily habit.  

These next two paintings and pen drawings are from another exercise of Pam's.  Putting down random colors and stroked of watercolor and then going back in with pen and drawing what you "see".  The first one was pretty easy for me.  I instantly saw ocean creatures and coral.  Not many, but some.  Then the other one was a huge struggle.  Birds, "flowers" and a tiny childlike house.  I drew what I saw but I am not so happy with either one.  What I learned though is the more varied my brush strokes are, the better chance I will have of finding something in my painting without the use of magic mushrooms. (no mushrooms were harmed in this exercise I promise but from what i have heard, they would have probably helped me "see" things) 

So that's that.  Keep on smiling and enjoy your life. 

Remember.......

Life is for the Living!!!!!!!

Life Is Busy

Wow!!!  Today is the last day of the first month of 2015.  This month has flown by.  This year, 2015, is a year I have been waiting for since 2004 when my life changed drastically.  I have not been looking forward to this year, but I knew it would arrive no matter what.  This year is a year I wish to drag by, pass ever so slowly and if Summer never came, it would be fine by me.  But at the same time, this is a year that I hope to prove to myself just how much I have grown and changed in my mind set and in my inner strength.  Few people in my life know of the event that changed my life in 2004 and why this year is such a big year to me.  In time, as the Summer gets closer, I will probably write of the event in more detail, as that will be my coping mechanism.

This new year has had me making multiple trips to Richmond to help one of my brothers organize my childhood home and prepare it to be placed on the market in about 2 weeks.  This has been both emotionally draining and spiritually healing all at the same time.  Spending time in my parent's home without them being there anymore, conjures up many, many feelings.  At first it was not so difficult and sorting through things that could be tossed, donated, kept or sold was easy.  But as things become more personal and the home I know and have loved all of my life, is being stripped of everything that is familiar, I start to find it more difficult to let go.  Moving ahead is what we need, must, do.  We have no choice.  None of my brothers nor I wish to buy the house and live in it, so we must sell it.  While my head understands this and it makes perfect sense, my heart is breaking a little each time one more thing is donated or deemed "junk".  With each bag and box placed either in the trash or in our car, we are one step closer to letting go our our childhood home.  The odds and ends that I decided I had to keep, have found places of honor in my home and when I walk past them, I find myself whispering "hi mom and dad" or "I love you" or "I miss you both so much."  It is nice seeing these little reminders throughout my home and seeing that I was able to find a way to fit them into my eclectic idea of decor.  I pray that whomever moves into my parents house, finds it to be the HOME that we all loved for all of our youth and for most of my parents adult lives.  I would love to see a young family move in and find a way to make the house their home.  I don't really want to see an elderly couple move in because that just means in the near future, it would be up for sale again.  I have always hated driving past old houses I have lived in and loved as an adult, and seen how the new owners don't take are of it the same way, or ripped out all of my flowers or gardens I planted.  I am pretty certain it will hurt 100 times worse to see someone not take pride in my childhood home and let the gardens go and not keep up the yard as my parents did.  My mom ALWAYS said, "This house may not be much to anyone else, but to me, it is my Castle."  And she meant it, she LOVED that home so much and took so much pride in everything she did there.  Please God, let someone else just like that, find that home and make it their Castle too.

In the time I am not in Richmond, Robby and I have undertaken the job of painting the entire inside of our house.  Moving things in from my mom and dad's had made me want to freshen things up around here this winter.  It is the perfect project for this time of year since we can be outside.  But, as much as I love painting our house inside, I am ready to be done.  I would much rather be in my studio painting something creative on a canvas or a wooden board.  I have started seeds already for the vegetable garden this year and am trying to stay on top of that.  I have so many different varieties of plants I want to try and the only way i know to do that, is grow them myself.

And one last thing, like so many other people who have a "word" for each year, I have one for this year.  It shall be the word "Free".  I want to be Free of paralyzing fear this year and for now on in my life, Free of guilt from past mistakes I have made, Free of grief and sadness that I don't have control over.  Free to experience all the beauty that life has to offer, Free to express myself through my art, whether that be cooking, painting or gardening, Free to be the very best mother, wife, sister and friend that I can be.  Yes, 2015 is a year I have dreaded for the past 11 years, but I am determined to make it be a year that will leave a positive imprint on me and not a negative one.

Life is busy, but it is full of love, love for me and love for me to give to others.