Weekend Art Journaling

On Sundays, I've been making art with three other women online.  Each of us have our own projects and we dedicate the time to connecting, chatting, getting stuff done and showing each other our work (when we can get the right angle on the camera).  This last weekend, I didn't have a project in mind so I did some art journaling in the SmashBook that I created from the Courageous Creativity course.

I had already painted the pages white and then smeared them with some color.  Next I tried a technique from Tracy Verdugo, gluing on pieces of paper napkins.  Here's a tip: give yourself time to pry apart the dang two ply; it took me forever. But once you have the single layer of napkin on the page, it almost melts into it. It's so cool. I found some quotes that I liked that fit with the pages and spent some time playing with lettering.  Clearly more time could be spent practicing lettering! I also did some doodling on one of the pages.

Fun way to get the creative juices flowing again.

Art books

A friend of mine gave me a gift certificate to a bookstore.  So much fun to pick out some good reading material. I'll give you an update as I work my way through them!

Say Their Names

Shereese Francis

(1982-2012). Killed by NY police officers on March 5, 2012. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she was off her meds and having a mental episode. Her family called the police to help get her to the hospital. She was shot in her home.

Trayvon Martin

(Feb 15, 1995-Feb 26, 2012)

Shot by a white man on "neighborhood watch" while he was walking back to where he was staying from convenience store. He was 17.

Rekia Boyd

(1989-2012)

Rekia Boyd was in a park with friends when an off-duty Chicago detective approached the group and started a heated exchange. The detective fired his weapon into the group hitting Rekia in the head and another person in the hand. She was 22.

Plugging my cat's instagram page

It's a bit embarrassing, but I've just had the best time scheduling posts of my cat, Rico Suave. He has his own Instagram page.  You can check it out at https://www.instagram.com/thecatricosuave/.  

Throwback Thursday: Game of Life

This was another project I found while cleaning up: an old Eyes Open Now workshop. The original description for the workshop was "Using old game sets, collage and paint, we will explore representing our lives in game form. Will you use your game to represent events in your past or will you use it to map your spiritual journey? Are the playing pieces aspects of yourself or other “players” in your life? Perhaps you’ll want to explore what rules are in your personal game of life. How you want to play is entirely up to you!"

Mine is an altered Monopoly for kids game that I picked up at a garage sale or thrift store. Here's the box cover. It could use more work but I wanted to get to the game itself.

Here's the board. I used hand carved images for different aspects of my life that felt important.

Can you see the little rectangles that are marked off near the images? Those are for the game cards.

I came up with a word or phrase that came up for me for each area. I wrote them on deli paper and then adhered them to the cards. 

Say their names; Know their faces

I'm in a book group right now studying Mindful of Race by Ruth King. It's a good read and helpful for navigating this time in the US. We were encouraged in this group to start a practice of remembering those who have been killed by police. I've been wanting to practice drawing faces, so I decided to combine these two exercises. I'm trying to draw a face a day, so here's a collection of last week's drawings. Unfortunately, the drawings don't really look like the people they're supposed to honor, but I'm already seeing my drawing improve.

Breonna Taylor

Shot in bed by Louisville, KY police with a no-knock warrant, March 13, 2020.

George Floyd

Killed by Minneapolis police officer kneeling on his neck for almost 9 minutes, May 25, 2020.

Atatiana Jefferson

Shot by Fort Worth, TX police in her own home as she was babysitting her nephew, October 12, 2019.

Ahmaud Arbery

Shot and killed while jogging, February 23, 2020. 

Throwback Thursday: Facing the Inner Critic

I've been cleaning up and reorganizing my space (again!) and came across this project.  I slapped gesso on an old kids' puzzle and then drew a rough self portrait on it. Next I mixed up the pieces and divided them into 4 piles. I asked myself four questions:

1. What does my inner critic say? 
2. How is my inner critic trying to help?
3. What would my friends say about me?
4. What can I say to me when my inner critic starts talking?

I also asked what color each of those answer groups would be and then I started collaging the four piles of puzzles in response to those answers.  I actually started writing the comments on each puzzle piece, but ran out of steam for that after a while.

I like that everything is all mixed up just like the voices in my head. :)

I decorated the puzzle box too.

She Tribe Paintings

Two of my closest friends have birthdays in June (one day apart from each other). I wanted to do something special for them so I watched Tracy Verdugo's Stories of a She Tribe video and tried it out. Unfortunately, I forgot to take photos of the process. 

First I started by writing down a short poem for each person and wrote those poems on the canvas with ink and a bamboo skewer. I didn't have the same ink that Tracy uses so I made due. She smears some of the words which didn't really work with the ink I used. She then used paper napkins for collage elements. I didn't have any of those either, so I used some Tim Holtz collage paper which is basically stamped vellum. This meant that I had to lay down some color too because those papers are see through. Then you turn the canvas around looking for images of people that pop out from the lines and elements that have been put on the canvas. This was really absorbing and fun to do. Here are the results.

Courageous Creativity with Dominque Hurley

The exercise with Dominque Hurley was to create a mandala. To get the images for the mandala, she led us through a guided meditation. First we identified a feeling. What came up for me was loving acceptance and the colors associated with that were royal blue which merged into bright green. She had us think of a location-- mine was a field by a stream and then to picture a gateway of some sort. Mine looked like an arch of stones.  She led us through some more exercises but what was particularly salient for me was asking our "guides" what I can do in my everyday life to achieve this feeling. She told us to accept their gifts and answers to our question. The first guide that popped up for me was Buddha who touched my head and then touched the earth. The second guide was Kwan Yin who gathered me up in her many arms and hugged me.  Her answer to me was to "listen." She then turned me around and gently nudged me forward.  So the outer circle of my mandala became Kwan Yin's hands. I carved this into a stamp and then stamped around the circle and colored it in with watercolor pencil followed up with Derwent ink sticks.  I really love how it turned out, although I do wish I'd stamped the hands in black instead of brown. I ended up outlining the eye so that it stood out more.

Here's what the hand stamp looks like on its own.

Courageous Creativity with Jenny Grant

Once again, I really enjoyed the Courageous Creativity exercise, this time provided by Jenny Grant. In some ways, this was like intuitive painting but with mixed media. And I remembered to take some photos of the process!

First we used a thin piece of cardboard (like from a cereal box) as the substrate and covered it with collage papers. She encouraged us to leave some papers hanging off of the cardboard.

Next we added paint. She had us smear some white paint on with an old credit card to soften some of the color differences and apply paint using a homemade stencil. 

At this point she drew on her page with pens and then cut it up to use for postcards. I decided I wanted to put a larger image on it and used a head that I had drawn from the Lucy Morningstar interview.  Somehow this person morphed into a superhero with wings. She's freaky but I like her. One of my favorite parts is the outlined squares in the background. I plan to do this exercise again using the same stencil and actually cut up the pieces this time.