Procrastinatory Art Journalling

 

Am I procrastinating?

Or am I just being too hard on myself? Is there actually something in there, in the depths of my brain, percolating away? I kind of hope it's the latter, though I know I shouldn't rely on it too much, if I want to produce art consistently. 

The following photos are unedited and unsorted, dumped into the post in the order that Blogspot deemed best, but I'm not sorry and not really that concerned.  Blogspot has made it so hard to blog in the last few years, that whenever I have the urge, I just want to run with it, in the most uncomplex, unresistant way I can. 

(Oh, and I had to use a different brand of browser to the one I normally prefer, because all of the little buttons started appearing as error messages, but that's just one of the vagaries of internet life.)

I haven't made any new Art (with a capital A) since the start of this year. I tend to go through rollercoaster-like phases of having ideas and feverishly trying to bring them into being, then long periods of self-doubt, never finishing anything and retreating into my 'comfort art'. 

Which, for me, is art journalling. About a year ago, I discovered a technique invented by Jennibellie. It's not an art technique, but one to choose what and how to art. I've always loved playing with randomising all sorts of things, so this was right up my alley. Being me, of course I expanded on the technique, adding more technique cards of my own, plus two dice to decide the colour and shape. There's no need to decide anything. It's quite freeing.

I tend to work on multiple journals at a time, plus a few loose junk journal pages. I'm so impatient about waiting for wet layers to dry, I figure if I work on more than one page at a time, I get more arting time for each round of waiting-to-dry time. I usually choose either 7 or 9 pages to work on, as I just like those numbers. Some of the pages are newly started ones, others have layers 5 or 10 years old already on them. 

I shuffle the cards, choose 6, or 7, or all 12, and then work through a round. When I get to the end, it always seems that it was too short, and I can't wait to shuffle them and start over again. And yes, I often ending up putting layers over layers that I wouldn't have thought of myself ... and sometimes probably shouldn't have. Ink tends to re-wet and bleed when something wet is added on top!

The results, though, are richer and have more depth than anything I've made before. It excites me to see the ink splatters and pencil alternating with paint and little collaged bits that contain memories. 

None of the pages in this post are finished, and yes, some are more successful than others (however you might want to measure 'success'). Most likely, none of them will ever be seen outside the confines of this blog or my instagram, and I'm still trying to convince myself that even so, it's still actually worth it. 

Weirdly, I've been getting an urge to draw on them -- actual drawings! That's the one thing I've always baulked at, and the main reason why so many of the old pages remain unfinished. Or perhaps a wash of pastel yellow paint IS the finished page, not just the background. That's the beauty of an art journal: it's my art journal, I can do what I want!

2022 and start of 2023 Update

Hello! I know it's been a while, but don't worry, I never intended to abandon this blog. It's just that, well, life got in the way for a while. So if you'll indulge me, I'll do a little update on the arts, crafts, garden, hobbies, and all the other random stuff that this blog covers. Then hopefully I'll do some expanded posts on a few different topics soon.

2022 was a bit of a topsy-turvy year for me. "Strange" is the word I've heard most when people were describing their year, and I'd have to agree.

Me

I was diagnosed with several 'new' chronic illnesses. I was already pretty sure I had most of them for a while, so there weren't any big surprises, but it was nice to have the diagnosis confirmed. I was then able to start sorting out the best treatments, etc. This kept me busy with appointments, new doctors, new medications, etc. 

 

Videos

My style and sewing Youtube channel has been continuing. In the beginning I was hoping to make a video once a fortnight, but in 2022 it ended up being once a month, on average. I'm still very happy with that, because along the way I've learned many new video-making skills, and it's been a lot of fun. My channel is here if you haven't heard about it yet and you're interested. 

 

Arts

2022 was a topsy-turvy year with art, too. In the first half of the year, my Collective and I staged 3 exhibitions. (That's a lot!) Then we took a long break. I didn't do any art for a long time -- I guess I was burnt out. Around July I slowly started doing some art journalling and started a junk journal. I wanted to ease back into things by doing something very low-key and low-energy friendly. In December and early January we had 2 exhibitions scheduled, so towards the end of the year I started to ramp things up a bit and make sure I did everything I wanted to for those. Plus, I made a real-proper website for my real-proper artist stuff. It lists all my past/current/upcoming exhibitions, projects I'm working on, etc. It's not quite finished yet, but if you'd like to see it, here it is.

Crafts

Arguably, a lot of my real-proper art has some definite crafty elements to it, as you can see above. Unfortunately though, I didn't do much crafting just for myself in 2022. I did start a new tablet weaving, but the tension was wonky and it was a bit of a mess. Husband promised that he would make some improvements to the weaving loom he made last year. After some delays, that was done last week and I started a new weaving. (Yay!) It's going to be a bracelet, but I'll probably end up with 2 or 3 as the base threads have to be at least as long as the loom, so I may as well make as many bracelets as will fit on.

Garden

The Spring/Summer of 2022 here in Australia has been such a strange one. It rained a looooot more than normal in Spring, and some days were cold enough to still be Winter! Many of my plants were confused and didn't know whether to grow or not, so things got off to a slow start. I did buy quite a lot of new plants, but I'll introduce them in a separate post.

Note: this isn't at my house but a spot nearby.

 

Home

I did a huge project in June to tidy up my Hobby Room / Studio. It was for a studio tidying challenge online ... and I won the challenge! I put it mainly down to stubborn persistence, and remembering to take 'before' and 'after' photos. Perhaps the 'after' photos don't look that much different, but to me it's a huge change. I was never a minimalist ... I think I'm firmly in the pro-Cluttercore camp. :)

  Thanks for reading, happy 2023, and look forward to more posts soon! (Soon-ish?) :)

Unfinished Crafts, June 2021

Plushy Letters : O

Continuing the plushy letter theme from my last post, I started a Plushy 'O', as it seemed the second easiest letter to design after 'I'.

Floral Skirt

I started this skirt a few months ago, and it's almost finished. I just need to finish the bottom hem, and I'll probably add some of this lace to it. To be honest, it's deep Winter here now, and this is a rather summery skirt, so I'll probably put it aside until the season comes around again and work on other things in the meantime.

Grannyland Blanket

This is such an easy go-to project to grab when I'm feeling the urge to craft, but don't want a lot of brain-work to do. I realised a while back that the overall blanket will look better if I edge each square in the same colour. I finally got around to purchasing some wool for the purpose. I don't know why I chose red. Black is too common for this purpose, and I'm already making another blanket with white edgings. I thought about the primary colours and red just felt like the right one. I've started the epic task of adding one row of red to each of the 36+ squares. To be honest, I'm still not sure what dimensions I want the finished blanket to be, so there may be more squares before this thing is through!

Art Projects

The last two projects are ones that I'm doing under my artist umbrella, rather than 'private' craft projects. They're both still in the early stages, so I won't talk about them too much now. They both involve a lot of cross-stitch, bead embroidery, knitting and other crafty details, so I thought I'd mention them here at least.

Take care and keep on crafting!

What I've Been Doing Lately

I've never been one to apologise for not posting for a long time, but gosh, it's been ages, hasn't it? With everything that's been happening in 2020, I'm sure you can't blame me. Whether I post once a week or once a quarter, I'm always intending to keep on blogging.

I thought I'd kick things off with a little wrapup of what I've been doing these last few months:

An exhibition!
I was lucky enough to be chosen once again to hold an exhibition at NOIR Darkroom, called Before(During)After. It was originally supposed to be in April, but was postponed a couple of times due to the pandemic and the gallery not being able to open. The gallery allowed me to change the theme, which I did to something more current. It explores how my art has changed during the pandemic and my uncertainty about what the future holds (for my art, but in general, too). There's a digital gallery on NOIR Darkroom's website which has photos and also an artist talk I did. I managed to talk for quite a long time for someone so shy!

Art! and a Conscript!
More specifically art-wise, I've been working on a series I call my Codex Pages. They're inspired by the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval book written in a mystery language that no-one can decipher, with strange illustrations. I've been fascinated with it for years. I finally had the idea of trying to make my own version. I created my own constructed script (conscript) for it. I always find this a lot of fun. I say 'always' when I've only created one before, but you get the idea! I'm hoping to write a post on this in more detail in the future.

These ones aren't finished yet:

Building a City!
Not a real one -- I was furnished with a game called Cities Skylines. It's like SimCity if you've heard of that (but better, by all accounts). My city just hit 80,000 inhabitants, and is called Lavender Town. I know! But it's not named after the location in the Nintendo game, but the pre-made map I chose in the beginning, which was called Lavender Lake. It's just the kind of game I like, and I've been spending a lot of time playing it lately. Here are a couple of screenshots.

Reading!
I was in a reading slump for several months, from about May to the start of December. I was given some ebooks to review, and of course whenever you're obligated to read something, it's no longer fun, so even though the books were good, I found it a little bit excruciating to get through them. (I still have 3 to go, oops!)

My friend Emilie started a Youtube channel a few months ago: Teacher Emilie in the Dining Room Library. She reads illustrated childrens books -- like an online storytime! It's kept me from having to admit that I read absolutely nothing in that time, if you believe that books usually for toddlers count! She often has wise comments to add as well. I recommend it.

I discovered The Story Graph a few weeks ago, and that's what really got me out of my reading slump. It's a reading community like Goodreads (but better, I daresay), with stats and graphs of books you've read. It aims to develop a really accurate and satisfying recommendations system. It's still in beta at the moment so you need to sign up to see everything, but for me it's definitely worth it so far. Reading challenges launched a few weeks ago, and members (including myself!) are enthusiastically creating and signing up for challenges.

Music!
Late last year I started a project to replicate my itunes library in Spotify. I ran into some hiccups at first which I won't go into (nothing to do with Spotify) but I've had lots of time to work on it while lurking in my cocoon this year. I'm working by artist and I've just finished the Gs, plus Eurovision working backwards from the present to 2004 so far. All the while I'm discovering new artists and songs. Who knew there was so much music in the world?
(The title of this playlist comes from a private joke of mine.)

Gardening!
Even through Winter there's usually something to do in the garden, but now that Spring (early Summer really) is here, it's all stations go! I'm barely keeping on top of the weeding, let alone planting new plants and re-potting old ones. But it's honest work and it makes me happy.

Well, that's about all I can think of for now. Hopefully I'll see you again soon!

Isolation Photo Project

Back in April, I took part in an online project hosted by NOIR Darkroom, a gallery in Melbourne. With (almost) everyone having to stay home, it was a welcome opportunity to look at the space around us in new ways. A prompt was released every day for about 3 weeks, and all photos submitted were posted on NOIR Darkroom's Instagram account.

It's a little bit belated, I know, but I thought I'd share them here for all the non-instagram folks, as well as a reminder to my future self. I've included my original comments, and further explanations in italics.

Day 1: Illumination
I know that I’m lucky to have a garden to spend time in. On sunny afternoons I lie on the grass in the shade of the fruit trees and breathe. This yellow leaf caught my eye as the first sign of Autumn.

Day 2: Still Life
aka how I spent my morning
I very rarely do my nails anymore, but I gave myself permission to do some things I normally don't feel like I have time to do.

Day 3: The Shadow
I can’t believe how well this turned out on my crappy old phone

Day 4: Repetition
Only 8 more to go!
I was making a stegosaurus toy for my friend's baby (24 plate pieces required) and this seemed like too good an opportunity to waste!

Day 5: Reflection
I’m surrounded by books and toys and games, but sometimes it’s good to just think.
This felt a bit pretentious to me, but people seemed to like it.

Day 6: Texture
[insert some artist waffle about contrasting textures here] Actually I took this the other day because #lazy and #nofilter because #brainfog #hair #grass #longhair
A couple of the photos were from the same session when I was sitting under my trees outside and mucking around with taking photos. It's unashamedly recycled from that.

Day 7: Out of Place
#anxiety
Out of Place is how I feel most of the time, so I thought it would be interesting to explore a visual portrayal of anxiety.

Self Portrait I lost track of what day it was after a while.
Because I’m not just how I look, but what I create.
Also, I'd done a couple of self portraits already and didn't want to repeat myself. It was surprisingly difficult to take an 'over-the-shoulder' photo of my hands without asking someone else to take it for me. I used my tripod but it held the camera so far away that the photo quality was quite bad. I think it adds a grittiness to the subject though. And yes, I'd really hurt myself on both hands recently.

Broken
Aftermath of the storm a few days ago
I wanted to do something a bit more psychological rather than literal, but everything I thought of didn't seem right. I remembered I'd seen a broken branch on my fruit tree the day before, so I took a photo of that.

Symmetry
I was mucking around taking some photos with my cat while I was trying to think of something for this prompt, and afterwards I liked the idea of a conceptual rather than visual symmetry.

Movement
I was bored, that's all I can say.

Moving Through
I wanted to give a sense of moving from indoors to outdoors, through the window. Maybe?

Contrast
My inspiration was starting to flag, but I managed to come up with this idea for contrasting colours and textures.

The project went on for about another week, but by then I'd lost my mojo. It was a lot of fun though, and helped me to see my everyday surroundings in a new, deeper way.

My January

January has been a typical one, weather-wise -- days of searing heat mixed with stormy downpours and sticky humidity. I was still recovering from my surgery, but got the go-ahead to resume normal activities in the third week of the month. I still find myself very tired though, and I find I need to either have a nap mid-afternoon, or go to bed very early. In some ways it's like being a two-year-old!


What I've been harvesting ...
The plums were ready to harvest this month. The harvest was about half what it was last year -- but I wasn't complaining. There were just too many for us to handle. This year, there was enough to fill about 4-5 plastic takeaway boxes once stewed. I just didn't have the energy to go to the bother of making jam (sterilising jars, etc) so I stewed them, packed them into boxes and stored them in the freezer.

Aside from that, most of my time in the garden has been employed in watering the plants, trying to keep them alive in the heat.

What I've been painting ...
I painted a landscape for a bushfire fundraiser exhibition/auction. This photo shows it still in progress. It's a bit different to my normal style: I was trying to be more realistic and make something that someone might want to buy.

What I've been journalling ...
I decided to do Rainbowholic's New Year 2020 Kawaii Journalling challenge. I've done 3 so far, not including the intro/title page. Here is my first page:

What I've been doing ...
I went for a walk in the park.

What I've been eating ...
After a trip to the dentist I went to a place I remembered from where I used to work over 10 years ago, which sold delicious French baguettes. It was still there! Emmenthal cheese, salami, whole gherkins and mustard -- just how I like it!

What I've been playing ...
Husband and I played Tsuro: Phoenix Rising, a variation on the popular Tsuro game. I think I enjoyed it even more than the original. I won't write any more now; I'm planning a full post in the near future.

What I've been reading ...
I've joined two readathons this year already! The first was Bout of Books, which went for a week. I managed to finish 4 books, one of which I'd had on my Currently Reading list for a year. That felt good. Currently I'm doing Pondathon, which is a story-based, co-operative reading challenge organised by CW from The Quiet Pond blog. Readers earn points for every page they read, and they affect the outcome of the story as its revealed over the 6 weeks of the challenge. There are cute characters, stamps to collect and, of course, books to read! Here's my character card with my first stamp: