Intuitive Art
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Otherworldly Winds: Work In Progress
Here is one way to balance art and the rest of daily life: just find a stopping point after an hour and say “good enough for now, the rest will be waiting tomorrow” and cut yourself some slack. I have not been having a good day and was tempted to check out and just read in bed wrapped in a blanket nest. Instead, I turned to that form of art that is always a warm embrace for me: intuitive painting.
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Refilling the Well
Taking the time yesterday to just relax and have a nice date night was much needed. I’ve been pushing myself to post here every day, and while I want to post as often as possible, there is a balance in creating and then resting to refill the well of inspiration. And coming back into the practice, I sunk into a nice intuitive painting: free from any plans or expectations. Leaf shapes are still my current artistic comfort-food of choice.
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Mark Making Part 16: Fountain Pens
Yay, the mark making project continues! Fountain pens are a medium I used to think was more for literary types rather than visual artists. I’m not sure where I picked up that idea, but after reading different artist’s sketch journals and following various urban sketchers, I’ve found they are a popular sketching tool. The lines have a unique quality, compared to felt tip fineliners and other pens. And the fact that the ink blends with water can be an asset!
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Mark Making Part 13: Charcoal Pencils
How can time both seem stuck in amber while also moving at warp speed? Most days, it feels like the evening passes before I can motivate myself to draw or paint. Yet every day feel so similar, it’s hard to believe the seasons are still changing, fall to winter. I worked through using almost all my charcoal pencils back at the end of September, before moving. Then finished out the rest at the end of October. So now it’s nearing the end of November that I’m sharing them! At this rate, I’ll probably finish my haphazard mark-making “use all my art supplies” project in *checks calendar* meh. Spring? So here…
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Mark Making Part 12: Soft Pastels
Now we’ve come to the dry mediums that I rarely use, such as pastel – and next after this, charcoal. Ever since moving to my own apartment (eek, 10 years ago ::stares into the far distance over the insistent passage of time::), I just prefer to avoid potential mess. I miss having studio space – or at the very least space in my parents’ house where I was less worried about losing a security deposit if I spilled a bunch of charcoal dust into the carpet. I’ve been looking at photos and videos of art studios recently, pining over creating an improved setup. Most of the studio tour videos I…
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Mark Making Part 10: Prismacolor Pencils
Prismacolor colored pencils are one of my favorite mediums; I find them relaxing, perhaps in part because they are a medium with relatively minimal setup and cleanup. They also blend well over other mediums, like markers or watercolor, making it tempting to include them in other traditional art illustrations. I keep mine organized by color in a large pencil case, which is a much better set up then my Copic marker situation of having all of them jumbled together in a photo keepsake box from Michaels (though at $3, the photo boxes work well enough for many of my art supplies. Plus you can label them within the pretty front…
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Mark Making Part 9: Various Colored Pencils
Continuing the mark making project, these drawings are from the end of April. The delay was in the scanning and cropping, ugh. Oh well! These were fun – I did one intuitive drawing piece first, which was a sort of surreal landscape. For the rest, I decided to follow the same path from my graphite pencils post and create gesture drawings with some stylized faces thrown in the mix as well. It was a lot of fun and quite relaxing. The light pencils on dark paper was a nice challenge. It provides an opportunity for the pencil to add light to the forms, rather than the normal shadows created with…
