Spirals and Chaos

It feels like eons since I last had any art time.  Given the fact I can complete an art journal page in under half an hour (often in 10 or 15 minute portions), my art journals really should not have been sitting closed for as long as they have.  It is a testament to how incredibly over-scheduled that I have been that I have been unable to make any time.  The start of the school year is always hectic as we all transition to new schedules.  I am also seriously busy at work and at home we are still trying to deal with the chaos that followed in the wake of our basement flood and problem-solve our way to a solution.  Juggling all of this stuff – and more besides – is seriously draining my free time and sucking up all of my available energy.

It was, therefore, a treat when I found myself with a sliver of time this weekend in which to work in my art journal.  I used an Art Journal Adventure prompt as my starting point.  The prompt was “spirals” and it immediately put my in mind of the poster for ‘Vertigo’, one of my favourite movies of all time.  The poster depicts two figures tumbling into a vortex of spirals.  I drew my weird wee self-portrait as the figure among the spirals.  I have a spirograph somewhere in the boxes of items we salvaged from the basement but there was no time to rake for it.  I, therefore, drew some concentric circles instead of spirals.  There are spirals in the eyes, however, which is pretty much an accurate representation of my life right now.

Fingers crossed that this art journal page is the break in my art drought.  My intention is to participate in Drawlloween.  I have participated in both Inktober and Drawlloween before and always enjoy it.  This year the challenge will definitely be one of time management.  I am going to be using the list of prompts provided by Mab Graves and I will be sharing my illustrations over on my Pict Ink blog and on Instagram.  So I have one week left to try and get my schedule under control.  Art is a good motivator.

Food Glorious Food

Well my determination to make and preserve time for art this year did not get off to a flying start in January.  I have been solo parenting since the beginning of the year and then I came down with some gnarly virus that caused me to have a fever for three days.  That illness, however, meant I had to take a couple of days off work to recover and recuperate when I was fit for nothing that could not be done on the sofa.  I, therefore, put together something in my art journal.  I used an Art Journal Adventure prompt – Food – as my inspiration.  I love cooking and eating so I decided to construct a simplified self-portrait which then combined with a Carmen Miranda type headdress composed of clippings of magazine photos of food.  It’s a very simple page, quick and easy to put together, but it was good food for the soul to actually do something creative when I was feeling so gross.

Utensils Abstract

I used an Art Journal Adventure prompt for this art journal page.  The idea had been to use household objects for mark-making.  I decided, however, to make an abstract piece by drawing around various kitchen utensils, overlapping the silhouettes, and then (very roughly) filling the resulting shapes in with acrylic paint.  It was just the type of quick dose of art I needed on a busy day.  My art table is in the kitchen so I was able to create this page while cooking and cleaning in the same space.  It’s rough and ready but it was a fun stress-buster to just throw some paint around on paper.

 

 

 

Vampire Lady

One of the interesting side effects of the way in which I create art these days – always short on time, often in multiple stages, often while multi-tasking – is that it has become clear what my automatic go-to art supplies are.  The fact that I almost always reach for ink and watercolour tells me that that is my creative “home”.  I, therefore, think that I should focus my skills development on those media.  However, I still intend to dabble in other media because I don’t like being hemmed in or stuck in a creative rut.  However, it is probably good to know that ink and watercolour are my comfort zone.

I grabbed some time this weekend to play in my art journal.  I used last week’s Art Journal Adventure prompt which was the letter V.  I never really need much prodding to illustrate mythology and monsters so as soon as I saw V I thought Vampire.  I resisted my automatic impulse, which was to draw Nosferatu (my favourite vampire) yet again and to instead try something different so I decided to draw a glamorous, fin de siecle lady vampire.   I not only kept things simple with just ink and watercolour but I also simplified things by using just black and red.  I like that combination and notice it crops up a lot in my ink work.

Poppies

In my Art Snacks box this month, among the items I received were phthalo green watercolour paint and a red watercolour pencil.  I was utterly stumped for a couple of days because the colour combination was just so horribly Christmassy.  All I could think of was Christmas trees and magical elves.  Aside from the fact it is only September, it is also utterly sweltering here.  It is so hot here that my kids were sent home early on their second and third days of the school year.  Am was, therefore, definitely and absolutely not feeling the Christmas vibe.  I then remembered that I had a bunch of Art Journal Adventure prompts I hadn’t used and one of those was P.  P for Poppies.  Poppies are red and their stems and leaves are green.  I had an idea!  But, as long term readers will know, I do not do botanical illustrations.  I suck big time at drawing flowers.  Not my thing at all.  My solution was an obvious one because it’s a subject I resort to all the time in my art journal: throw a female figure in there.

I went way too heavy with my first layer of phthalo green watercolour which meant the subsequent layers just got darker and darker.  The clothed portion of the figure is way too dark and opaque.  I dislike it.  Also, that arm is way too long.  She would have orangutan proportioned arms if that arm was straighter.  I think, however, that I just about get away with it.  Maybe.  I chose to stylise the poppies because I knew I would never be able to pull off more realistic poppies.  I quite like those.  So I feel rather meh about this art journal page but I am glad I did the Art Snacks box challenge because it was the shove I needed in a hectic, busy, difficult week to eke out some much-needed art time.  The value of that can never be underestimated.

Wonky Selfie

“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, / Gang aft agley”.  Robert Burns might as well have been writing about my summer.  We pulled off the travel plans but all my other schemes either went totally pear-shaped or just entirely withered on the vine.  I do a sort of homeschooling, educating by stealth, summer project with my kids ever summer – have done since my oldest was a preschooler – but this summer the project had to be abandoned because pretty much everything else got derailed by so many stupid things plus my flipping awful oral pain.  Anyway, in early June I had this whole vision that I would have so much art time – so very much art time – over the summer break.  Ha!  Yeah.  Didn’t happen.  In fact, I have probably spent less time on art this summer than in previous summers.  Sigh.

For that reason, I desperately had to eke out whatever art time I could to make sure I don’t rust up to the point of my creative joints being totally seized up.  I wanted to do something really loose.  There was an Art Journal Adventure prompt from a couple of weeks ago about “doodling”.  I thought that would be the perfect thing to do for some super-quick art time in my art journal.  Determined to be loose and not fuss about perfection, I decided to draw with my non-dominant hand (which is my left) and – for a bit more challenge – using the blind contour technique.  I opted for a self-portrait because I figured I would be familiar with the shapes, forms, and proportions of my own face so that the drawing didn’t get too abstract and crazy.

I used pencil just to avoid making a total mess while not looking at my page but I did not erase a single mark.  What I did was go over those pencil marks with microns in three different sizes, just for a bit of variety and interest.  Then I added watercolour and – to keep the challenges coming – I painted with my left hand.  I am actually stunned by how well I painted with my non-dominant hand.  Certainly I achieved keeping things looser than normal.  For other people, this drawing probably is not remotely loose but, believe me, for me this is loose.

Queen Bee

I had oral surgery just over a week ago – annoyingly two days before I took my Oath of Citizenship – and unfortunately experienced some complications which have prolonged my recovery process and caused an exceptional degree of pain.  I am trying to be stoic but it has been really pretty miserable.  I am very much looking forward to being pain free and being able to eat foods that are not liquid.  Consequently, I have not been able to do much or accomplish much but I did think that some time spent pootling around at my art table would be restorative.

Not having much capacity for creative mojo in my current state, I decided to use a couple of Art Journal Adventure prompts to create an art journal page.  I chose one involving altering an existing image and one that was the letter Q.  I used a page out of a fashion catalogue as my starting point.  The previous owner of our house must have been a big catalogue shopper as we still get loads of them in the mail, addressed to the occupant of the house, most of which I plop straight into the recycling bin but some I keep as collage fodder.  I filled the gaps around the selected image with more scraps of catalogue page and some washi tape.  Then it was time to add paint and start altering the image.

I decided that Q was be for Queen and from there I decided to make the figure a Queen Bee.  Given the context of my physical condition, I kept things super simple.  Just a layer of paint, enough to alter the image and suggest the bee idea.  I had some washi tape with gold hexagons on it which was perfect for this project since the gold tied into the crown and the hexagons suggested honeycomb.  And that was that.  Quick.  Simple.  Done.  And a welcome distraction from my agonising jaw.

Fungus Fairy

The full title of this piece should be “The Fungus Fairy and the Unfortunate Phallus”.  It is a cautionary tale about going straight to ink when drawing and not taking time to think things through.

The Art Journal Adventure prompt for last week was the letter “F”.  Don’t enquire why I thought to draw a Fungus Fairy as a result because I actually don’t know why.  Let’s call it a flash of inspiration.  I know that I was feeling in the mood to draw something whimsical.  In my early teens, I decided to draw my own versions of the classic Flower Fairies.  I think I got about twenty illustrations done before I packed in the whole enterprise because I loved drawing but hated colouring in (I was using pencils).  Maybe I should start over now that I actually enjoy adding colour to my illustrations.  But I digress.  Short on time (as always) I decided to commit to drawing straight away with pen.  No pencil guidelines.  No preliminary sketching.  Just straight from my brain to my hand to the ink pen.  The way I drew the Fungus Fairy a lot of the line work was over on the right hand side of the page so, to fill in a bit more of the left hand side, I came up with the bright idea of giving her a toadstool as a sort of magical wand.  Yeah, I don’t know what on earth I was thinking either.  In the very instant that I lifted pen from paper I realised that the fungus wand looked like a phallus.  Great.  So, yes, this is a cautionary tale about maybe taking some time to plan things out before committing ink to paper.

Jekyll and Hyde

I decided to tackle an Art Journal Adventure prompt in my art time.  The prompt I chose from the ones I have skipped was the letter J combined with “something that shows half”.  Frequent readers of my blog will know how my mind works and understand why I immediately settled upon illustrating Jekyll and Hyde.  I interpreted “half” was being about duality but also chose to represent it literally by splitting my illustration in half and making one side more Jekyll and one side more Hyde.  I think I just about got what was in my head onto paper.

Clone Children

This weekend, I grabbed some small parcels of time and used them to create an illustration in my art journal.  I used last week’s Art Journal Adventure prompt, which was to use an element and repeat it at least three times, and combined it with a prompt I had missed that involved the number 5.  The idea of repetition made me think of clones and that made me think of the pod people from the movie ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ and then that segued in my brain to thinking of the book ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ and thus I arrived at a decision to draw five clone children with expressionless faces and soulless eyes.  I did the grey and black inkwork first and had intended to leave the hair white as a nod to the movie adaptation ‘Village of the Damned’ but, on a whim, I decided to add a splash of colour with red ink.  I am undecided as to whether that was a smart move or not and my children – who I use to judge my art work – are split 50/50.  What do you think?