Life Musings

  • Marking Making Part 10 title card, with supplies and drawings arranged in flat lay photo
    Drawing,  Intuitive Art,  Life Musings

    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…

  • Goddess drawing - Finding Center featured image
    Inspiration,  Life Musings

    Grounding and Centering

    Lately, as this new routine of isolation and extra caution settles in, I’ve been turning to nature and spirituality for comfort and guidance. I wish it hadn’t taken a crisis to help nudge me into this direction, as I’m realizing just how much I was missing having spirituality in my life as a primary part of every day. Spending more time in nature, reading books I’ve been meaning to get around to, journaling more (in my private, personal journal), tending to my altar: it’s all been helping me to feel more grounded and centered. I’m feeling more motivated, knowing I’m trying to align many parts of my soul, including my…

  • Marking Making Part 7 title card, with supplies and drawings arranged in flat lay photo
    Drawing,  Inspiration,  Intuitive Art,  Life Musings

    Mark Making Part 7: Crayons and Other Nostalgia

    So this one was on the principle that if I’m using all my art supplies, the little kid ones count too! I bought these crayons and markers way back when I was first working through The Artists Way. I thought making art with them would be a fun “artist date”. I can confirm, drawing with crayons is a) fun b) satisfying to my “inner child” and c) like sooo easy to relax, because who cares what it looks like, it’s just for enjoying the moment of creating stuff! Little kids get this stuff right off the bat, but we can remember that carefree creativity through some repetitive effort *grin*. I…

  • Marking Making Part 5 title card, with supplies and drawings arranged in flat lay photo
    Drawing,  Intuitive Art,  Life Musings

    Mark Making Part 5: Prismacolor Markers and Little Loose Ends

    Tonight was photo session night: taking the photo for this post’s title card, as well as a couple more. It was too overcast today to use the sun for good photo lighting. Then it became so late in the evening that I had to use the LED lights, which are suuuuch a pain to set up. They are Ricky’s photography lights, so he was helping me at least. Tonight is also a night where I feel tired and worn out from stress, reading too much news, and feeling uncertain about the future. Still, it’s a blessing to have art to focus on. I am just ready to go make chamomile…

  • Marking Making Part 3 title card, with supplies and drawings arranged in flat lay photo
    Drawing,  Inspiration,  Intuitive Art,  Life Musings

    Mark Making Part 3: Calligraphy Pens, Random Felt Tip Markers, and Other Such Things

    Calligraphy pens are one of those things I buy, thinking I’ll practice fancy hand lettering techniques, and yet I never really get around to it. I have this vague notion that, as someone who majored in graphic design, I should be obsessed with lettering and typography, but my interests have always focused on web design† and illustration. Typography is intriguing to me, but that isn’t a very high bar to jump: my curiosity can be peaked by pretty much any article on Wikipedia. It’s no wonder my calligraphy pens don’t see much mileage, if it was general curiosity that spurred me to buy them, rather than passion. I do like…

  • Yellow petaled flowers
    Inspiration,  Life Musings

    Try, try, try again

    Title to the tune of row, row, row your boat. So. I had written most of the post below (and the title and sentence above) at the end of February, when I was feeling like I had more energy to finally restart blogging and commit to making more art. But I didn’t want to post it until I finished creating a light theme for my blog (and let us leave aside this tried-and-true procrastination method for now); this retro-terminal-dark-mode one had been bothering me lately, though I couldn’t put my finger on why exactly it felt constraining. So the post waited a bit while I thought about a new layout…

  • A photo of two sketchbooks, one with a page showing a ballpoint pen tree drawing.
    Digital Painting,  Drawing,  Life Musings,  Sketchbooks

    Catching up: Character Art & Sketchbook Musings

    I finished that mercenary digital painting back in early May. I’ve also been sketching more in my portable sketchbook and picked a few highlights to post. Since my post last spring, I’ve been waiting to post more until I’d figured out a more cohesive plan for how I want to make art, but that is just a laughable goal at this point. I’m far, far too an inuitive person to have a “cohesive” plan. A plan, sure. A plan that goes mostly out the window when the rubber hits the road. The more I wait to think up the perfect plan or perfect order in which to learn and practice…