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| Vortex in my glass |
"I’m struggling to get back to my arty self . . . I do feel guilty when I create something and there’s not a sewing stitch involved somewhere . . . And now I seem to have stopped exhibiting I’m more a player and dabbler than an artist!Maybe it’s just a sign of the current times that things aren’t flowing, but somewhere, deep down, there’s a little itch. I just have to find it to scratch it. I’m not sure if it will be textile based or mixed media yet but there is an itch. I will just have to wait and be patient and really give myself permission to just please myself in what I make. Stop aiming for a specific audience."
Do check out her post. She's been up to a lot, much more productive overall than I have been and doing some interesting things, even if they don't technically fall under the heading of "art". As for me and my itch, I felt it and knew I was coming back when I looked in the bottom of my glass after drinking the last bit of juice, saw all those frothy bubbles, recognized them as a favorite Zentangle and wondered how I could take this image into my work. (See first photo). As for actually scratching my itch soon, I think it is to work from a pattern my cousin sent me because, like me, she could envision it in my hand-dyed fabrics. I have not had any inclination to keep a "pandemic diary", nor to memorialize the virus or the lockdown in a textile piece, or even in an art journal. But as I kept pulling out the pattern, it felt a better way to speak to these times where peace and the wishing it to the world is so needed and can mean so many different things.
I am keeping up a daily drawing practice and killing two birds with one stone. I have so many free videos and mini courses I've signed up for with teachers from Sketchbook Revival that I've decided to use them for my "prompts". For the most part, they are suggestions for warming up before you dive into your real work or activities meant to get your creative brain thinking in a different direction to unleash ideas you never knew you had. They are fun, quick and revealing. And going into the 4 x 6 book I made with the Kraft Tex cover. I started with Susan Yeates "5 Days of Creativity Boosting Exercises" which mostly comprises making marks. On the first day she's suggesting you use a brush pen to play with the different widths of lines you can get as you just make marks - repeating lines, circles, squiggles, whatever. The arrows show where I realized that the dots I had added became the eyes of fish in some cases. Then move on to a paint brush (which I did not) and then grab things lying around to get marks on the paper. I chose both ends of a wine cork and was surprised at how different each end printed (I used an ink pad rather than paint). Also stamped with a bit of bubble wrap.
The next day's warm-up was to "fill in 30 shapes in 5 minutes." I wanted to try all the shapes - circles, triangles and squares - so did one shape per day. And I KNOW this took longer than 5 minutes (as noted by several students in the comments). I did something similar to this during last year's Sketchbook Revival, but with a different teacher. It's one of those things that may not seem like anything is happening as you do it, but looking back over them later, a few might have possibilities as a jumping off point.
On the next day, how about just squiggling a random line, then doodling around it? Maybe you will see a shape or thing emerge, maybe you'll just end up with patterns around it. I surprised myself with my buxom nude.
Similar to the filling in 30 shapes exercise was one where you draw simple shapes like cups, vases, even leaves, and fill them with patterns. Do a single color pen version and repeat with a version with patterns in color. For some reason, I felt very constrained doing this and not very creative in thinking up patterns to add, unlike her examples that were filled with so much interest. There was also a day for blind drawing things lying near to you. No matter how many times I do blind drawing exercises, I cannot warm to them, and will keep my results to myself.
More fun was five days with Mica Scalin's "Creativity Sprint." She's the sister of Noah Scalin, the guy of the connect the 100 random dots exercise. Day one, rearrange the letters in your name to spell something different and then make something inspired by that. I've never been good at rearranging in my head so I wrote out my name, cut it up into individual letters and had a lot of fun moving them around to say something. I came up with several ("a bare nails sheen" was a favorite but didn't spur any creative images I could sketch out) and settled on Insane Rehab Lanes, thinking up improbable names for various rehab facilities. A chance to let my quirky humor out.
I really ended up liking day two which didn't seem like much on the surface but definitely unleashed something. Just pick something to trace around and fill the page with tracings, placed any way you want. I made it just random, no thought or planning as I traced around a foot locker key. It was nice for a change not to have to look at something and draw it.
And that apparently unleashed my brain because before I'd filled the page, my mind was swirling with non-random arrangements. I just had to fill two more pages with these ideas which shows how I naturally lean toward symmetry and kaleidoscope placements.
Day three was a variation of an exercise I've done before, with the idea of letting go of perfection: spill something and create something from the mess. I had a piece of paper that I'd spilled a few drops of coffee with cream on lying on the desk so used that, as little as there was to work with. But as I considered the drops, I saw eyes and it was fairly easy to draw a face around them. A third drop way off to the right became a flower tucked behind this pale girl's ear.
Day four we were to embrace limitations, the prompt being to create something inside of a box. Very little explanation goes with these prompts, I'm sure as to not influence or stifle ideas that might otherwise spring into your mind, but I had the feeling she meant to actually take a box and create something inside that. I wasn't going to spend time with that so I thought about how I could sketch the same idea. I decided on a glass box with characters trying to get out. Surprised again that I could draw a jack in the box and his friends. I just don't do this kind of drawing, but I found it very fun and a bit of a challenge.
I really felt I didn't understand what we were to do on the fifth day under the heading of Inspiration is Everywhere where we were instructed to create a rainbow from the objects available in your immediate surroundings. I just looked around for items that matched each color in a rainbow and drew multiples along arc lines. Did not feel creative at all.
The final day was supposed to be a collaboration to make the point that you can't do it alone. I suppose I could have figured out a way to get someone else involved but since I'm doing these as a quick exercise, I was not motivated, so skipped this one. The final part of this sprint was reflection, looking back over how you responded to each prompt. Which was your favorite (the key tracing one which I think did the most to free up my mind to come up with other things), what was the most challenging (the rainbow one mostly because I didn't feel I understood what I was supposed to do and it made me uneasy as I kept feeling I was doing it wrong which says something about my personality too), what's the one thing you learned from the experience (that I can push some of the fantasy stuff farther than I thought, and oh yes, that symmetry thing), and finally, what is the one area in your life/work where you would like to bring more creativity? Not surprisingly, I want to bring more creativity back into my art quilting. I really hit a wall a few years back, really felt stuck and then had to move away from it for awhile. I'm certain this long break is slowly unsticking me. A bonus prompt was to make yourself a trophy for "an awesome job". I will also spare you a look at what I drew, a tongue in cheek participation award shaped like a snow globe with a star in the middle and spikes like the crown on Liberty along the top. Now to move on to new daily drawing ideas.
The next day's warm-up was to "fill in 30 shapes in 5 minutes." I wanted to try all the shapes - circles, triangles and squares - so did one shape per day. And I KNOW this took longer than 5 minutes (as noted by several students in the comments). I did something similar to this during last year's Sketchbook Revival, but with a different teacher. It's one of those things that may not seem like anything is happening as you do it, but looking back over them later, a few might have possibilities as a jumping off point.
On the next day, how about just squiggling a random line, then doodling around it? Maybe you will see a shape or thing emerge, maybe you'll just end up with patterns around it. I surprised myself with my buxom nude.
Similar to the filling in 30 shapes exercise was one where you draw simple shapes like cups, vases, even leaves, and fill them with patterns. Do a single color pen version and repeat with a version with patterns in color. For some reason, I felt very constrained doing this and not very creative in thinking up patterns to add, unlike her examples that were filled with so much interest. There was also a day for blind drawing things lying near to you. No matter how many times I do blind drawing exercises, I cannot warm to them, and will keep my results to myself.
More fun was five days with Mica Scalin's "Creativity Sprint." She's the sister of Noah Scalin, the guy of the connect the 100 random dots exercise. Day one, rearrange the letters in your name to spell something different and then make something inspired by that. I've never been good at rearranging in my head so I wrote out my name, cut it up into individual letters and had a lot of fun moving them around to say something. I came up with several ("a bare nails sheen" was a favorite but didn't spur any creative images I could sketch out) and settled on Insane Rehab Lanes, thinking up improbable names for various rehab facilities. A chance to let my quirky humor out.
I really ended up liking day two which didn't seem like much on the surface but definitely unleashed something. Just pick something to trace around and fill the page with tracings, placed any way you want. I made it just random, no thought or planning as I traced around a foot locker key. It was nice for a change not to have to look at something and draw it.
And that apparently unleashed my brain because before I'd filled the page, my mind was swirling with non-random arrangements. I just had to fill two more pages with these ideas which shows how I naturally lean toward symmetry and kaleidoscope placements.
Day three was a variation of an exercise I've done before, with the idea of letting go of perfection: spill something and create something from the mess. I had a piece of paper that I'd spilled a few drops of coffee with cream on lying on the desk so used that, as little as there was to work with. But as I considered the drops, I saw eyes and it was fairly easy to draw a face around them. A third drop way off to the right became a flower tucked behind this pale girl's ear.
Day four we were to embrace limitations, the prompt being to create something inside of a box. Very little explanation goes with these prompts, I'm sure as to not influence or stifle ideas that might otherwise spring into your mind, but I had the feeling she meant to actually take a box and create something inside that. I wasn't going to spend time with that so I thought about how I could sketch the same idea. I decided on a glass box with characters trying to get out. Surprised again that I could draw a jack in the box and his friends. I just don't do this kind of drawing, but I found it very fun and a bit of a challenge.
I really felt I didn't understand what we were to do on the fifth day under the heading of Inspiration is Everywhere where we were instructed to create a rainbow from the objects available in your immediate surroundings. I just looked around for items that matched each color in a rainbow and drew multiples along arc lines. Did not feel creative at all.
The final day was supposed to be a collaboration to make the point that you can't do it alone. I suppose I could have figured out a way to get someone else involved but since I'm doing these as a quick exercise, I was not motivated, so skipped this one. The final part of this sprint was reflection, looking back over how you responded to each prompt. Which was your favorite (the key tracing one which I think did the most to free up my mind to come up with other things), what was the most challenging (the rainbow one mostly because I didn't feel I understood what I was supposed to do and it made me uneasy as I kept feeling I was doing it wrong which says something about my personality too), what's the one thing you learned from the experience (that I can push some of the fantasy stuff farther than I thought, and oh yes, that symmetry thing), and finally, what is the one area in your life/work where you would like to bring more creativity? Not surprisingly, I want to bring more creativity back into my art quilting. I really hit a wall a few years back, really felt stuck and then had to move away from it for awhile. I'm certain this long break is slowly unsticking me. A bonus prompt was to make yourself a trophy for "an awesome job". I will also spare you a look at what I drew, a tongue in cheek participation award shaped like a snow globe with a star in the middle and spikes like the crown on Liberty along the top. Now to move on to new daily drawing ideas.
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