Small Stones: 25 Jan 2011

a line of starlings huddle on the power wire
taking refuge from the noisy passage of a car
they await the return of quiet winter stillness
to fly back down, en masse, into the yard
and eat their fill before the storm.

Video Thursday: How to Grow a Mandala

Here's a bit of an art break. Anyone can make a mandala. It's a fun exercise that doesn't require any special tools. You can draw a mandala in your lined notebook with a ball-point pen or in a sketch pad with a felt-tip marker. Follow these simple instructions and you'll be relaxing with a mandala in no time.

Carpe Annum!

Seth Godin wrote recently in his blog about the perils of waiting until everything's perfect to take risks and put yourself out there. I've written about this kind of thing myself. Waiting for the Muse doesn't work very well. It does work, but very slowly for many of us. You'll get better results if you go to your Muse and ask her to come round for a cup of tea or the like. Take her out for a walk. Do something different. And observe. Be there, in the moment, during whatever activity you choose. Notice things. Write them down if you like. Sketch them. Or just hold them in your memory until you get back to your creative space to commit them to your chosen form.

Your creative space doesn't have to be perfect either. As long as you have a space where you have room to comfortably work without distraction, you have what you need. Sure, we'd all like an extravagant art studio with all the finest supplies, or a spacious corner office with a glorious view and the most expensive furniture money can buy. But that doesn't make creativity happen. In fact, you might even feel stifled in such an environment. "I spent all this time and money to prepare this space... how can I justify that? I'll have to create a masterpiece/write the best-selling novel of the decade in a place like this!" Carve out a nice space where you can, even if it's mobile or temporary. And then call in the Muse for a little chat.

The most important thing is to seize the moment. The time is now. If you wait until you 'feel inspired', you'll probably be waiting a very long time. And in the meantime, others who've chosen to go ahead and create anyway will be ahead of you, building characters, discovering techniques, making mistakes that they'll learn from.

Don't wait. It's a brand new year, just waiting for you to reach out and grab it.

Detractors: leave 'em in the back of the bus

Seth Godin wrote a fantastic bit of advice in his blog today. It's called "I need you to see things my way". "If you need the validation and acceptance and patronage of everyone you meet," Seth writes, "you'll get stuck, and soon."

As creatives, it's natural for us to want people to like our work, to like us. It's easy to take a critique of a piece personally, to apply it to our own personal self-worth instead of keeping it where it's meant: on the work being critiqued. I've written about this topic here before, but Seth Godin's brief post brings it into focus.

"If the kids in the back of the bus/audience/store don't get it (or don't get you) it's their loss. Focus on those that want to celebrate the work you do instead."

Not long ago a friend of mine stopped by my house and complimented a painting I had hanging on my wall. It's the only example of my own artwork I've so far hung up in my home. If I don't value my artwork, I figured, who will? The friend praised the painting and went so far as to say she might one day purchase one like it for her future business location. People like that are the ones you want to keep close at hand. Turn your back on any detractors you may encounter. Some day they'll wish they could say they knew you before you were famous.

Art Recharges

I took myself out to the art store yesterday. When I'm struggling with my creativity, picking up a new art thing and working with it usually helps me get back on track. And saving money is a bonus! I did both, as a pack of Tombow Dual Brush pens was on sale for nearly 1/3 the regular price! Apparently Tombow is discontinuing the 'Earth Colours' package, so it was discounted. I love finding bargains like that. A few extra dollars in my pocket is always a welcome phenomenon! I spent some time last night playing around in my journal with the brush pens and I like the results. They're great for making backgrounds to do journal entries on as well as for general artsiness.

I'll get back to my writing soon. For now I'm taking an art break. Have yourselves a good weekend.

Scheduling and the Creative Process (January 22, 2010)

Partner to my writing creative process is my artistic creative process. It's one I've been overlooking lately. It's been probably a month since I did anything more than the occasional doodle in the margins of a notebook. I used to paint and draw and even collage occasionally. But lately I've found myself bereft of the willingness to break out even my Derwent Inktense pencils, which I dearly love, and work on something. I get a weekly art prompt from IlloAnnounce and yet I don't draw. (Perhaps it's because they didn't display my only submission a few months back and I feel snubbed by them, but that's another matter.)
 
Art has its own way of freeing me, as does writing. It's a completely different way of expressing whatever stuff is inside me that needs to be put down on paper, or, in some cases, electronically. I enjoyed the brief detour I took with my graphics tablet a few weeks ago, but nothing more has come of that. I pondered breaking out the tablet again this week, but the week seems to have gotten away from me. I have a lot of little chores to do, a bunch of actual work to do, and some hobby stuff, in various states of completeness, that would like a little love too. And household chores, don't get me started. Dark laundry leers at me from the hamper in the closet, reminding me that I will soon run out of clean socks if I don't wash it already. The newspapers on the kitchen table threaten to topple out of the chair I put them in, ready to crash to the floor in a petulant demand that they be put into a paper bag and tied up for the Boy Scouts to take one Saturday a month.

Time Flies

I find myself constantly asking, "Where does the time go?" And in response, my mind, trained on an old MUSH I've been a member of for years, says, "Schenectady, ma'am." Well, come on back from Schenectady, there, time, 'cos I got a lot of stuff that seems to not get done every day.

It comes down to scheduling, I suppose. My Morning Pages and daily writing sessions have imprinted a sort of framework for my day, but after dinner it all seems to go every which way. After dinner is, my mind seems to say, play time. You worked during the day, writing and whatever else, and now you get to play computer games, which is what I spend too much time doing in the evenings. And there's a variety of games I visit: I've got a lot to just play on my own, let alone the Internet games that involve other people.

I find that I have difficulty slowing down. The computer contributes to that. Sometimes I long for a quiet evening spent reading or doing artwork. I've been attempting to schedule myself a 'no computer evening' once a week, but that hasn't quite taken off yet. I used to have 'no computer' Saturdays, but my habit of sitting here and writing, on the computer, every day, has kind of put a damper on that. I get my best writing work done, so I believe, in the mornings, before lunch. So I sit here and type for a while before getting distracted by the Internet, eventually to be sucked down into the rabbit hole for at least an hour, reading email or checking Facebook or what have you. There's some time I can reclaim.

Video Thursday: Watercolour on Yupo

I recently came to the realisation that I haven't done any artwork for close to a month. This is a sad state of affairs. I haven't even played around in my art journal for at least that long. I came across a video of an artist working with watercolour on Yupo, a waterproof synthetic paper.

I love to do abstract art, and what Mark Mehaffey does with Yupo is amazing. I've been meaning to grab a pad of this stuff from Dick Blick, but art has been a non-priority for me these last few weeks. I hope to remedy that soon.

Odosketch

I stumbled across a fantastic site/tool called Odosketch. This is a sketching application driven by Flash that allows you to save your drawings on the site, so others can view them, clone pictures you like of others and modify them, and just generally doodle and draw and have fun. It's a lot more fun with a graphics tablet, but you can have a lot of fun just with the mouse. Might be difficult with a touchpad.

Some of the colour selections draw brushlike strokes that widen with length. Others draw pencil-like lines. There's a white colour tool you can use to paint over your colours and blend them (the background is a pale grey with flecks to make it look like recycled art paper). When you're finished, save your picture and you can watch it redraw itself at high speed. Saving a picture requires a signup, but you just need an email, name, and password to get started.

This is a silly sketch I did, based on a previous sketch of just the cat. I cloned the first sketch and added more colour and background. With the replay you can see all the erasing I did and all the white application that I later worked into a face that was actually visible.


Take a look at both the featured sketches (my favourite is the alien abduction one) and the current sketches, which shows things posted by people in real time.

Odosketch is a great little tool if you feel like arting it up a bit but don't have a lot of time or don't want to get messy. Now if you have an art attack right before an important interview, you can satisfy it without getting paint on your nice clothes.

Video Thursday: Art Journalling with Suzi Blu

This week's video is from Suzi Blu. In this vid she talks about art as life and starting an art journal. I like to share these videos periodically because they're uplifting to me. Suzi is a cheerful person who emphasises art in her life. You should too! So should I, for that matter. It's been a bit since I worked in my art journal. Anyway, check out Suzi Blu.

Sketching. And Writing. Really. Well, sort of.

Note to self: when planning to watercolour a sketch, don't sketch it with a water-soluble sketching pencil. Also, don't try to erase lines made with a water-soluble sketching pencil with a gum eraser. Success rate is low.

Other than that the sketching is going alright. I'm experimenting with using colour or just going black and white. I couldn't sketch the kids at the bus stop yesterday because they weren't there. So I settled for sketching a few pictures from my newspaper, and they turned out okay. I'm hoping to get out to the park this weekend and try sketching some other people and/or things.

I know this is meant to be primarily a writing blog, but the writing has been pretty ... not there recently. I've felt drawn to the art side, so I've meandered a bit. Julia Cameron, author of The Artists Way, in an interview I heard on tape, mentioned jumping from one creative frying pan into another. When this creative endeavour stops working, she jumps to another one. I feel the same way lately.

I still have plans to complete my manuscript, at least in a usable first draft edition, before CreateSpace's offer ends at the end of July. I also have Associated Content articles to work on and two short stories to write, not to mention I keep bumping into ideas all over. Frustratingly they're mostly bits of things: pieces of setting or background or the like. But I'm writing them down. Hopefully they'll prove useful in conjunction with plots or characters at a later date.

I'm coming back round to the concept of 'Ass In Chair' - in order to get all these projects done I must sit my butt down in the chair and write. My manuscript's not going to edit itself, nor are my stories going to write themselves. A periodic diversion for art is all well and good, but my nose has to go back to the grindstone soon.

Here's hoping you all have a great weekend. See you Monday.

Art Brain Confession

Time for me to 'fess up: I'm supposed to be composing more awesome bloggage for you folks, but... I watched willowing's vid that I put up here yesterday, and then another one (my favourite and very first willowing video I ever saw, "Treat Yourself Like You Treat Your Best Friend"), and I think I might be doing art today instead of writing. Hm. I've started prepping two sheets of watercolour paper (forgetting until just now that I should be taping them down and not using rubber bands, duh, so they don't dry buckled), and... well, I have watercolour crayons and Inktense pencils and all kinds of good stuff.

So, er, yeah. Not much going on in my writing brain right now. I got that one short story started earlier in the week, but I find myself editing as I write to keep the thing tight and keep out unimportant details, and I could, and probably should, be doing that type of work after the story's finished.

When Art Muse attacks, she does not take 'I should be writing!' for an answer.

Video Thursday: Ten Rules of Life

I realised I haven't featured the videos of the wonderful willowing here yet. I discovered her YouTube videos last year and she's been responsible for some personal insights as well as the purchase of a lot of art materials (that I otherwise wouldn't have tried out). Willowing is a carefree, creative, loving artist whose videos never fail to inspire me or boost my self-esteem. Because, as I've said here, it's okay to make crappy art/writing/etc. The point is to do it. If it feels good moving through you, it doesn't matter if The World thinks it's good. Anybody who'd come right out and tell you your work sucks isn't worth your time anyhow. So there.



I think I might do some art today. It's been a while. I should crack out the watercolour crayons and have some fun. Why don't you give your artistic side a few minutes to play today? Sketch, doodle, paint if you have the time. Just grab some crayons and go to town. Boss being annoying? Pick up some crayons and draw what a big goofy-head s/he is. At home. Where it's safe. Traffic evil? Draw a satellite blowing up all the speeders and lane-jumpers and tailgaters. Bzz-B-DAM! Behold my crappy five-minute Gimp sketch! Imagine what fun you can have with real crayons (I can smell them in my mind... mmm, crayons...) and paper! You could even colour in the cars, which I neglected to do. You have the power. Use it today!