Category Archives: Inspiration

It Eats You Up

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One of the many things I’ve learned over time is that giving into anger for long periods of time isn’t helpful. It’s one thing to allow anger to burn through you, own it, and then allow yourself to work through the hurt that it is masking.

Last year taught me that my rage was fast burning but that the hurt that my slow burning anger was masking was the root of what needed to be dealt with.

Injustice should be rooted out and the snake oil sales people will pay for their actions, let karma be the bitch.

It Eats You Up

Promote What You Love

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Leslie 017

The "Promote what you love instead of bashing what you hate," images are rolling around twitter and facebook these days. While I agree, and I've seen first hand how powerful promoting something you love can be, both for you and the person; I think it's foolhardy to ignore what you hate entirely.

The story with the ostrich sticking it's head in the sand is a good one, bad things don't go away if you ignore it. The same for tryingto think only positive thoughts, you can't make bad things or depression go away by thinking it away. We aren't magnets and the world isn't fair and sometimes hard work doesn't pay off. Sometimes life sucks.

BUT I've learned that you can make things work for you if you spend some time and are honest with yourself on how you can take that bad situation and force it to work.

My matra will be "Promote what you love instead of bashing what you hate; but keep a mindful eye out for the bad stuff."

Realistic vs Unrealistic Goals

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I've been planning on doing a little side project from all my other projects, because, you KNOW I need another project! The side project is loosely called "You Said Something, It Was Really Important." (OR, "You Said Something, I've Never Forgotten.")* It consists of photos from my journal, taken all hi-res, made into a PDF and then loaded to MagCloud. From there you'll be able to get a magazine or a download or both. Awesome.

As I was concieving this little project it took a lot less time in my mind, shooting pictures should take X amount of time, creating the PDF should take X amount of time, I can get it done in a night!

Not.

Shooting hundreds of pictures takes hours, not an hour. When you take a picture of a journal you end up having to figure out the BEST way to get the image and it took a few minutes of set up and a couple of tries to get a set up that worked properly for most of my journal page. Also , please note that a large sheet of plexi glass keeps your pages flat and a polarizing filter helps cut the glare and makes colors pop. Once i figured that out I STILL had to wade through the good and the bad in the journals. Some of the stuff is too personal and other still could get me fired from the DayJob if I publish it. I tried to keep a good balance and stayed on the edge- you get to see some stuff that I haven't put online, in hi res, printed glory AND I get to stay employed. It's a win!

In the end I realize I've got more than once zine's worth of stuff or one really FAT zine full of stuff. I'm struggling with how big do I want to make this thing? 50 Pages? 90 pages? 150 pages? Add to that, if I do 150 pages then I'll probably never do another, and I think I want to do another. Also the cost of the thing goes up dramaticaly if I do more than 50 pages. I want to keep it affordable. (BUT, how cool would a 150 page zine be?)

The other part of this is, I really thought, once I shoot the pictures I can flood them into publisher and get my PDF done. Yeah not so easy. There is no easy way to flood 50 images into publisher all at the same size. They all come in at different sizes, need to be resized to the correct size, put in the RIGHT spot, contract and color tweaked so they look correct, background color chosen, etc… Graphic designers of the world I salute you. (Also please tell me that the Adobe suite is easier to use than publisher… Future goal: get a Mac and Adobe.)

So I'm about 33% done and feeling kind of bummed that I won't be able to finish this by the weekend. "You Said Something" won't be ready for another week or so. I'm still debating if I add captions or not. How many words do I add, if I add any at all? Maybe that should all be hand written too… You see where I'm going here? I'm one of those peopel that dives into a project like this head first, no plans and figures it out as I go along,I give myself unrealistic and unattainable goals and then I'm surprised when I bung it up.

So now I know ho wmuch work goes into this, I'll make sure I set more realistic goals in the future.

Continue reading →

Watching some RSAnimate

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Yesterday I met with a friend of mine, he's a terrific artist and we had a nice long chat over great coffee. During our talk we spoke of the TED talk about school killing creativity. When I got home I looked up the talk, it's a good one and linked below. You should watch it.

In some ways I think that our root fear of play and experimentation in our art and journals, where does it go as we age? We were all pretty creative when we were 5 and 6 and even 7. But at some point we all want to draw realistically (this is tied to developmental milestones) and I think get frustrated and quit. If you look at most kids at specific ages they all go through this. Some of us never get past the frustration.

The next video is about the paradox of choice. It's not directly related to art, but I think you'll see why I put it up here. I think we get into a mode of overwhelming choice when we walk into an art and craft store. It's why it's so easy for companies to shove crap down our throat when we don't really need or want it. Step 1: Overwhelm the consumer with too many choices and Step 2: Prey upon that and TELL them they NEED specific parts to create a project. Never-mind that you could unlock their creativity by teaching skills rather than spoon-feeding a specific project. But then unlocking creativity isn't as good for the bottom line as selling a specific project that requires the person buy items off a list. (Think #cultofstuff)

 

 

 

The final video, in which I think I could do an entire post about, is about the movement about staying positive, and that you can bring everything to you by presenting a positive front. Slap a smile on your face and everything you've ever dreamed of can be YOURS! I'm not afraid to say that sometimes my life and my brain are dark dark lonely places. Sad. I've got a relatively good life- a nice enough house, a car that runs, a lovely wife, a DayJob that pays my bills, and good health. Honestly, I've got it better than many people. I'm happy about that, I won't lie. But there are days when I hate everything about life. It's not wrong to say that sometimes, life isn't fair and life sometimes sucks. That's realistic.

I'm not suggesting we all let it hang out. No, I think we should be realistic in what our lives are like, it's not all sunshine and roses, sometimes it's dog crap on the floor and a flat tire on the highway or a bad day at the job. Not being honest about these facts of our lives is as ridiculous as always painting a smile on your face and pretending they don't happen. These dark spots are WHY I art journal. I pour the shit out onto a page and then turn it. I paint dark little scenes on watercolor paper and then pour ink on it. Denying these aspects of my life isn't honoring myself. Hiding it away doesn't make it go away. No matter how many pretty pages you paint in your art journal doesn't make everything alright.

The process is what makes things right not the product. It's okay to slather paint on a page and just turn the page and never look at it again, every page does NOT have to be finished. MOve on, just like your life moves on. It's the nature of an art journal that you move on. You grow as a person and grow in the art journal. Don't let false positivity hold you back from creating something that is wonderful because you are afraid to explore something that is not happy or perceived as not positive.

 

Honesty, Authenticity, Truthiness and Resonance

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When I was in school everyone talked about wanting to make "honest work." The new buzzword for honest work is "authentic." We could spend days over glasses of red wine and mugs of coffee (as we did in college) talking about what this means. In the end it all boils down to, "I want to make work that resonates deeply withing myself and has deep personal meaning." End of story.

Or is it?

I think the truth of all the discussion and thinking on these topics is that essentially we're afraid of what we put on the paper/canvas/board/ or in the journal. Many of us make work and hide it away. It's why the art journal is so perfect, at the end of your art session you close the covers and never ever have to confront what you made again. Simple right? Except you're missing out on a  prime piece of the art journal process- learning from what you've put down and thus from yourself.

I think that fear is why we also buy into what the industry pumps out for us. It's far easier to follow the industry's recipe for success than to forge our own path and style.

Maybe the real question we need to ask ourselves is, "How do we move past the fear and into creating our work? How do we learn from ourselves to create work that resonates deeply?"

It's this hard work that an art journal is intended and supposed to help us explore. If you never look back at your pages and be critical of them (without gessoing over them) and learning from those pages what are you missing out on. If you focus on nothing but making pretty pretty pages I think you're missing out on a very important part of art journaling.

Here's a challenge: Go through your art journal, either the current journal you're working in or a recent one. Use a sharpie, write on the margins of a page what you'd change on that page. If you are too chicken you can use a post it note. If you get bold, draw right on top of the page with your sharpie.

Out of the Can Thinking

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I've been watching some old episodes of Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home on Hulu. I grew up watching Julia Child on PBS. PBS being one of the few channels that came in and was approved for me to watch. I credit a lot of my enjoyment of cooking to both my Mom and ravenously watching Julia Child's shows.

One of the things I notice as I watch J&J:CaH is that Julia rambles on quite a bit about how Americans are afraid of their food and how the diet industry is winning out over taste. Secretly, I could watch these shows over and over again.

Julia has a good lesson for us, and it applies to art. We can't let the industry win in dictating what we want and how we want it. Child's recipes for successful tasty dishes included fresh and basic ingredients combined in ways to create layers of food, she poo-poo'd using canned foods and already made stuff. She stated over and over, "It's not hard, the recipe is a guideline!" Art and art journaling are no different. We should be demanding the basic ingredients and supplies we need to make our art and not canned supplies. After all it's not hard to customize and create your own stuff if you only

Dede and Eveline are a prime example of taking a recipe and making it their own and taking it to entirely new heights. Dede put out a challenge to Eve that she make Tim Holtz's 12 Tags of Christmas without using his voluminous list of supplies. Eve took up the challenge as did Dede. their results are nothing short of spectacular. Out of the can thinking at it's finest.

The art and craft industry responds to demands, but as it's a big slow and lumbering machine full of people all trying to get the NEXT BIG IDEA and thus the next big paycheck. The lumbering machine hears about art journaling, tries to figure out what it is, there are big IMPORTANT meetings in board rooms to try and figure it out, there are more meetings in board rooms, and hapless cogs in the machine are sent off to investigate ART JOURNALING. They know nothing about it, they watch a few youtube videos, read a few blogs, and maybe a few of the more intrepid cogs join AJNing. They take some notes, maybe even dabble in a little art journaling and finally something like the Smash Book is born.

Now, thousands of people will be introduced to Art Journaling via the SmashBook. It might even be a decent product, but it's not what I consider a true art journal. It's an interesting concept and an interesting way to finally grab hold of a potential market. Hey, it's even got it's own special glue stick, color coordinated tabs, and a hundred other things to buy to go with it. ARGH!!!

Go simple, buy yourself a sketchbook, a cheap one, a few markers, maybe a cheap set of acrylics or watercolors, and start splashing shit around on the page. Try stuff, watch some videos on youtube get a few recipes but for goodness sake don't be afraid to only use it as a guideline.

 

Weekly Round Up: Videos

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This week's videos are late because I had an Art Adventure on a super warm winter day! Cappuccino, breakfast sandwiches, walking around the city of Salem, and of course sketching. (Also planning for a new secret project or two destined to hit awesomeness this coming summer.)

So here you go this week's videos:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Journal Flip: Moleskine #3

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I started this journal the spring before I found out that a family member was going to need emergency open heart surgery and have her aeortic valve replaced. I found out that August and the surgery occured in November. Not long after finding out I ordered a new journal, the happy summer drawings and paintings didn't seem to fit with the down and somewhat sad theme that seemed to pop up.

I've never bothered to go back and fill the remaining pages. I don't think it would fit with the journal. Sometimes it's time to simply move onto a new journal and start fresh. It's okay to simply move on.

 

Papers I’ve Been Using

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I've been testing out a variety of papers for my automatic drawings. I'm not being very scientific about this, just trying things out with my style of working. I have done a large amount of them in a Canson Universal Sketchbook. It's a great sketchbook, the paper is sturdy and accepts light washes with ease. The paper cockles when I use more watercolor. With ink it's perfect.

Papers I've Been Using

So I taped down some pieces of Canson XL Bristol. I like this for ink too, in fact of all the papers the ink really pops off this page. It's bright white and after watercolors dry the paper is smooth and flat. It's really great but I didn't like how watercolors behaved on it's surface. It was absorbent and dried very fast.

Papers I've Been Using

Next up I tried another Canson paper, Montval, not or rough watercolor paper. It's one of my favorites with watercolor. I love the nooks and crannies of it's rough surface, it makes watercolors blend in amazing ways. Ink also looks great on it, but the pen tends to skip across it's surface. It's a little harder to draw on than the other papers. When it dries, it's perfectly flat.

Papers I've Been Using

Papers I've Been Using

I think what I'll end up using is a cold pressed watercolor paper. The hard part with this whole thing is that I never know what I'm in the mood for, I let these images grow organicly and the end result is that I never know if I'm going to cross hatch the hell out of an image or flood the page with watercolor, so I need something that can handle both.