This is your fault, mum! Remember that hint about wanting a pic of your new sheepy? I might have gotten a little carried away… Though I now expect you to knit him a proper Bob Marley hat for Christmas hehehe.
I thought I’d try drawing a sheep in striped hat, similar to one Bob Marley had. Because black Wensleydale sheep do look like they have dreadlocks. They just do….
So um sorry mum, but I will do a proper Marley picture later *giggles*
A quick sketch of a Suffolk Punch that I finished and scanned in this morning. This counts as yesterday’s sketch because I just had a few tweaks of tone to do and the scanning.
Jinty – Highland Pony – Pencil sketchI posted this on DeviantArt yesterday, then forgot to blog here too. Whoops!
I’ve always found it harder to draw cobby type horses and ponies. When I was at school I spent hours sketching and painting dainty arabians because they just seemed to move like magical creatures. I learned to ride on Highland ponies, and adored them, but I’ve never been able to draw any of the stocky native breeds.
So, for some practice and a challenge I drew this portrait of my biggest (and certainly fattest!) Highland pony, Jinty. She’s a challenge just in the gold highlights of her mane and the dark stripes and spots on her face. There’s a real satisfaction in making myself do something out of my comfort zone, if I get really brave I’ll draw the other side of her so I can get her full mane drawn. I pity the 4 horses she stole hers from, I really do!
I’ve been playing around with my scanner and installed Simple Scan – it makes a lovely clean pencil scan, so I’ve just had to touch the levels and change to greyscale in Gimp. In Jinty’s case I also moved the sketch into the centre of the paper so there’s a clear margin for framing. But I’m much happier bringing my pencil sketches onto the PC now it’s just a quick tweak in Gimp. No excuse for not scanning in my sketches now, and very useful when I start working on cartoons from my sketches.
I’ve been meaning to write this sooner, but I was too busy making stuff to blog about it. Which is great for me, not so great for the blog 😉
Every day I’m getting up and writing my Morning Pages (see the Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron). It took a few weeks to establish that daily routine and not forget to do them. Also, to open up into full stream-of-consciousness and not edit or be too polite and superficial. The idea is to get to my real thoughts, not the ones I homogenised for others.
I’ve returned to using a paper diary rather than my computer one. The computer one just wasn’t nagging me like my paper one did. Remember when you were at school and teachers would give out gold stars and such for your work? I find writing things in my diary is like giving myself a gold star.
I use a cheap diary with enough space to list my work/creative activities each day. You don’t need to have a diary, just a blank notebook with space for each day. I write in how many morning pages I do (all 3 or less) and any work/creative things I do. The diary stays open on my desk. I see how well I did yesterday and how the current day is going. The blank space nags me to do something and fill it in.
The worst thing in my diary is an ’empty’ day, if I can’t think of any creative thing I did that day it spurs me on to do twice as much the following day. Or frantically rush to get things done before bedtime! It’s been months since my last empty day, so this works well for me. I never lie to myself in there, though one of my early entries makes me laugh…. It just reads: “I created…..a fruit salad!!” It was one of those days I meant to do something and all I made was this fruit salad.
I only use to-do lists when something specific needs to be done that day. I let myself do a range of activities each day and I’m not feeling guilty about it. My output has multiplied so much it’s incredible. I feel happier and I haven’t been bored or stale in weeks. So the proof is in the pudding. Or the fruit salad 😀
I seem to be spending time evenly considering I don’t schedule anything. But I’ve spent days where I’ve written, made some jewellery, sketched and then done some cartoon practice. Other days I’m doing just a couple of things. It all balances out in the end. Once I stopped feeling guilty at moving from one activity to another, it made all the difference. I keep things where I can see (and be tempted by) them. Shoving something in a drawer is the easiest way to forget it.
I still use timers if I’m on the PC – it ensures I take regular breaks and I’m aware of how far I am through the day. When you’re at home alone all day it’s so easy to lose track of time! If I’m not on the PC I’ll set up a playlist of music that will run out when I want to take a break.
So a big thumbs up for multi-tasking artistry and managing time effectively. Even if I can’t tell you what I’ll be doing tomorrow. But that’s the whole fun of it!
I’ve noticed recently that my interest in artistic work isn’t what it used to be. My work output has just been deathly quiet for a long time and I really struggle to get any work done. I just can’t feel enthusiastic painting and drawing as I did when I was younger. I suspected this was just a result of me becoming older and losing that buzz, or that my frustrations with other aspects of life had just dampened my enthusiasm. Those seemed like reasonable explanations.
So this general feeling of “meh” led me back to doing my morning pages – writing stream-of-consciousness for 3 pages each day. And some meditation each morning too. I wanted to find out what the problem was and return to a more productive workflow.
I did my morning pages today and realised that I had a much simpler problem. I’m bored! Instead of letting myself create different types of art and crafts alongside each other, my sensible side decided that I must focus on one discipline and not deviate from it. No matter how much I wanted to stop drawing and make some jewellery, I didn’t let it happen. I forced myself to specialise. One by one my specialities were abandoned after the forced specialisation got too frustrating. My mind simply resents being told it must stick on one path, stamps its little foot and tantrums.
I admire anyone who is genuinely delighted that they do the same thing each and every day. But for me it’s like some advanced mind torture. Rather than improving my output and making me into a better artist, it drove me crazy, killed the output and made me worse. Screw that for a game of soldiers!
So, I had a think about this and here’s what I decided:
So it’s official… I’m going back to multi-tasking!
Moving forward I’m going to return to a previous workflow that I enjoyed. Where I allow myself one project for each discipline – one knitting thing, one crochet, one painting and so forth. Then I can switch between activities for variety but I don’t accumulate a ton of unfinished work. I’ll probably be more relaxed than that – I’m very good at finishing work even if I don’t feel it’s going well. But I am certainly going to let myself have variety in my working day.
I actually forgot to update this blog at the time, so this is a late post heh. I finally finished painting Lily and uploaded her picture to DeviantArt.
And finally, I’ve returned to Etsy! My shop listings expired at the end of 2010 and I waited till I had art prints before I revamped it.
I kinda *squeee!*’d when I opened the prints for the first time. Like maybe I can almost be accused of art. Almost.
Oh and I’ve got a new jack russell mutt now. But I’ll post about her later.
Another digital painting – this time it’s my old golden retriever, Hamish. He sat by our halogen heater and the resulting light inspired me to turn it into a portrait. As usual this painting is for sale through my DeviantArt gallery [link].
I haven’t decided what to work on next, but it’ll probably be one of our other doggy friends – can’t have the cats having the numerical advantages hehe.
I forgot to blog this at the time, but I finished a digital painting of my cat Misty. As usual I created it using MyPaint software and my Bamboo Fun tablet.
You can buy prints etc over on DeviantArt [link].
I’ve been working on a series of cat paintings using MyPaint and my little tablet. The process is getting faster and I’m growing in confidence with digital art generally. I want to try using the Gimp for some art too, but I have developed quite an addiction to MyPaint. It just doesn’t get in the way of what I want to do. I’ve tried to do things the same way I would with real paint and brushes and MyPaint is really nice for that. I think the MyPaint work will help me work in Gimp because I’m more savvy about brushing and using layers. The last time I tried using Gimp I didn’t have a clue where to start 😀
So, without further words – here are some pictures of the artwork I’ve been uploading. You can hop straight to my DeviantArt pages by clicking here 🙂
This is the first digital painting I did of a cat. I really didn’t think I’d manage to get the fur pattern right, but in the end I’m really happy with the result.
Here are the practice sketches I did in pencil before I started my paintings.
