I must admit that I am enjoying drawing these way more now that I am not painting.
I am quite surprised with how different each of them are.
And how each time I think I took a step forward, I also see that I took two steps backward. I spose that’s how it feels to learn.
But I am still enjoying the process. I am still trusting that things will get better, even if slowly. I am trying to take my time. Give myself permission to mess up. My other journal is on its last page so I bought a new journal for February and cannot wait to fill it all up with faces.
Six Portraits a Week is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.
Today’s page was week three’s homework for the Soul Restoration class.
This week’s theme is about the strong and weak selves. I don’t want to talk a lot about the details of the content since it’s Melody and Kathy’s content but I’ll talk some about my personal thoughts and things that came up for me.
The art is a two-pager in my album. Just fabric I cut up and then the images and text on the right side are by Melody and the text on the left is also by her. The image on the left is a norman rockwell painting which I cut up. Nothing extraordinary.
I have always believed that the things that make me strong and weak are one and the same. The same traits help me succeed and excel and they also cause me to fail and to break. For example, I tend to be loyal to a fault. When it comes to positive people and situations, loyalty is a great trait. It makes you a great employee, a wonderful wife, and a desirable friend. But in the wrong hands, this can easily crush you. I follow through and work hard and do not give up easily. This, too, is wonderful when it comes to solid jobs and relationships. But when I am in a situation like TFA where I was drowning and I still wouldn’t let go, well it’s just stupid. This great trait doesn’t serve me well. I love deeply and endlessly and this causes me to be paranoid during the weak times. My self-doubt makes me work harder and try more and be grateful more often and feel less entitlement. All of which are good. And yet self-doubt is not so great.
The self doubt also makes me want to say yes to everyone and everything because who am I to turn anything down? And yet then I get stressed and frustrated and I don’t treat the people I love as kindly as I should. So I am learning to say no. Even when it hurts. Even as I am scared the person will hate me, will think i am a diva, will never offer me any other opportunities. Even with that, I am learning to turn down things that will stress me out or set me up to fail.
So my strengths and my weaknesses come from the same core and the same traits. When I am in a bad place, they come out in extremes and spiral downward. When I am in a good place, they help me get better and excel more. So the lesson here is to:
1. embrace who i am. the good and the bad since one cannot exist without the other
2. try to keep myself in a good place for as long as i can since success and good mood definitely builds on itself
Since this is true of me, it’s also true of everyone around me. My husband, children, parents, friends…The things that make them the people I love are the same things that cause their weaknesses. David’s carefreeness and laughter are why he sometimes doesn’t pay attention or focus as much as I’d like him to. Yes, I wish he could be better at that but if I force him to focus better, will I lose the carefreeness too? Am I willing to give up the good, just to not have to put up with the bad? I ask myself this all the time and the answer is no for all of my personal traits. And the answer is no for the people I love. So each time they “mess up” I remind myself that it’s the other side of the token I love and I will endure it because I love this person and this is how they are.
Knowing how I am in a spiral and how my traits manifest themselves in a weak spot is beneficial for me so I can recognize the signs. So I can tell the people I love to watch out for them and so I can ask for help when they’re coming. Also so I can do some preventative work to try to keep myself in the “good” place more often. But things happen. Life’s very cyclical. So there will be bad days. That’s inevitable.
And there we are. There’s more of course. About not comparing, setting achievable goals, being ok at being mediocre, looking for supportive people, shedding the bad. Learning to walk away. I can go on and on.
Details:
Weekly Art Journal is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.
So as I explained last week, I stopped painting my portraits. And I’ll start by saying I am sorry the photos aren’t great quality, I need to rush less and take more time taking higher quality photos.
Having said that I love slowing down and taking more time to draw the faces.
I am trying to experiment with shading and different shapes.
I can see where I struggle and where I need much more practice.
But I am enjoying the process. I am trusting that things will get better, even if slowly. I am ok with that. I think each medium is hard and challenging on its own. I want to do the charcoal/shading first. Experiment with different eye, nose, mouth, face shapes. Different shading. Master all of that. Then move on to paint. One step at a time.
Six Portraits a Week is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.
Today’s page was week two’s homework for the Soul Restoration class.
This is a representation of the timeline of my life. I will be turning 37 this year and this goes up to 40. Each row is 10 years. There are many sentences and markers. Black is for the hardest times in my life. Grays are for the not-so-great times. Colors mixed with gray are times when there was a mixture of really good and not so great. And the textured wallpaper one is for times when it was overall good but had some roughness day-to-day. Reds are love and children. That’s about it. It all means stuff to me of course but no need to explain step by step since it would be meaningless to most people here.
However, I wanted to talk about some of the interesting things that came up for me when I did this exercise:
1. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that the “really bad stuff” is less than 10% of my life. I am blessed to have never really suffered to anything terrible in my life. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my share of sorrows, shitty friends, broken hearts, rejections, etc. When I was little, my parents got divorced and I took it quite hard. But, they got back together and remarried each other and are married to the day. Wonderfully, I might add. I’ve never lost anyone to a grave illness or really even out of order. I’ve lost my paternal grandfather very young but he passed before I was born. My maternal grandfather died younger than he should have but he wasn’t young. My paternal grandmother just died last year at the age of 92. She was probably the closest person to me who died. I’ve been blessed to never suffer from real abuse of any kind (small case here, i’ll admit but I’ll talk more about this later.) I’ve never been assaulted, robbed, in debt, homeless, hungry. I’ve never suffered from a grave illness or had a close family member who did. I’ve never had to truly hide my identity or beliefs. As I mentioned, I’ve had rougher moments and I’ve worked really really hard in my life, but I’ve also been truly lucky and blessed. And yet, I often live my life like I’ve survived a tragedy. I feel a bit broken inside. I have abandonment issues. I feel undeserving and not enough. I am insecure. I worry constantly about losing my kids, husband, job, anything really. And yet, I have no reason to. Life’s been wonderful to me, and it’s time I start being grateful for it. It’s time I shed the victim mentality. This page shows it to me in black and white. I have much so much to be grateful for. Time to wake up.
2. I’ve also noticed that most of the “bad things” are things I’ve dragged on longer than they needed to. If you look at the last 25 years of my life, the first black is a relationship that wasn’t working and yet I simply wouldn’t walk away. I refused to let it go and I waited until it reached a breaking point. The second one is TFA where I drained every single bit of myself before I let myself walk away. Both of these times could have been at a minimum lighter gray. And yet I pushed the situation until it reached a bad point. I can stop myself from doing that next time by recognizing that I have a tendency not to admit defeat when a situation is obviously bad for me. Defeat is not always bad. Sometimes it’s better to walk away.
3. The last bad thing that happened to me “without my control” was over 25 years ago. The last really gray time was 20 years ago. I need to stop clinging to those things. It’s been a long time and it’s ok to let it go now. I have friends now. People like me and people love me. I can stop clinging to that time and the sadness that surrounded me then. I can be happy now. It’s ok to let it go. It’s ok.
4. I tend to go through periods of flurry of activity and often times even the good periods come with some rough moments. This is expected and normal. The rough times last a lot shorter than they seem.
5. There are rougher times that are there for a reason. Four years ago, I worked really really hard for two years. I mean really long days, for a long time. But it paid off, it’s how I was able to establish the trust and groundwork that led me to be able to work from home now. That’s when I was putting the seeds in so that I could collect them now. Just like I am doing it with exercise now. Working really hard so I can reap the benefits later.
6. I am most definitely in the golden period of my life. I feel more like I’m thriving than I ever felt. I feel more in my element than I’ve ever felt. It’s time to celebrate that and push it even further. Time to use that strength to let the past rest. Give myself permission to let it go and to know that if I lay all this burden down, things will be ok. It is no doubt that rougher times will come. These things are cyclical for sure. So I might as well truly enjoy these moments. Appreciate them, make the most of them. And when the rougher times come, remember to make sure I don’t drag them out and make them worse than they need to be.
I have a lot more thoughts that came up this week. I hope to write about them more but these ones were all directly tied to the timeline art. Isn’t it amazing how much you can realize about your life with one piece of art?
Details:
Weekly Art Journal is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.
Since I’m still working on CHA work and can’t post anything, I decided to post other art.
Last week, I was telling you about the classes I’m taking, so this week I wanted to show some of the work I’ve been doing. Please bear in mind that all of this is really new to me and I am learning one step at a time. I am ok with this and I like to keep it all here so I can look back on it over the years and see progress, evolution, change of focus, etc.
So let’s start:
Soul Restoration
This class is a lot about soul searching and so there’s a lot of journaling and art. I posted one of the pages I made yesterday and I will be posting more likely. I am doing all of my class in one journal that I made over. Here’s the front:
and the back:
Here’s one of the inside pages:
I will share more pages as I move along.
Shifting Ground
This class is all about the journaling, so there’s no art to show. But I’ve been doing the work. I’m doing it right in my daily planner just to make sure I don’t have any excuses. Just writing and writing.
Stephanie is amazing and I am finding this class to be thought provoking and ground shifting. She has a magical way with words.
Stretching Within
And finally, Misty’s class. Last week was all about drawing. I put it off for ages. It kept bothering me but I wouldn’t sit to do the work. I was dreading it. I have a lot of issues around drawing. My abilities. I can go on and on. Anyhow. I finally sat down and did some last Sunday. This is less than a quarter of the homework and I just used her examples to make it simple so I could stop making excuses for not doing the work.
Here are my drawings:
One of the assignments is to pick an image and draw it every single day for five weeks. This is my pick but I’ve only drawn it once. Pathetic, I know.
There’s doodling:
There’s drawing lines and shapes with shading:
There’s contour drawing:
Line drawing:
More contour drawing and some shading:
and a mixture of unfinished stuff:
And that’s what I’ve done so far. Buried in CHA work. Buried in homework. Buried in work work. More coming soon.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this project. My thoughts are still not clear so bear with me. Btw, I appreciate all the feedback you’ve been leaving so please don’t interpret my silence as lack of appreciation. I go back and forth between my ideas. Part of me wants to just draw and not paint so I can focus on one thing at a time. Draw more with shading and charcoal for the whole thing. Then focus on painting once I’m really good at the drawing, shading, etc. Part of me likes the painting and doesn’t want t give it up. Part of me wants to draw these, more idealized, faces and part of me wants to make them more emotional, more real, more artistic. I am pretty lost. I will give it a solid think and then decide.
Actually I’m thinking I will move to just drawing them. What do you think? I feel like if I can draw them really really well with lots of great shading and blacks and whites and everything in between, then I can worry about the painting afterwards. First, I can learn to add emotion. I can learn to change expressions. Really really focus on the portraits. And then worry about the painting as phase two.
So with that here are my last set of six painted portraits for a while.
Here they are, painted:
and then here is the next three drawings:
and painted.
Let’s see how the drawing works out.. I make no promisses. I might come back to this. Or even do a different version. Who knows….
Six Portraits a Week is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.
Catalyst One Hundred and Twenty-Seven is: What’s your word/focus for 2011?
Thoughts:
“Let go of the past, be free to do anything you desire. Anything.” My word for 2011 is free. I plan to let go of all of what holds me down from my past and also let go of all the ideas I have in my head of what I can and cannot be in the future. My plan is to work on whatever I need to work on so I can clean the slate. Be free of any burden. Free to do anything. Truly.
Details:
Today’s page is inspired by the amazing Melody Ross. Nothing nearly as amazing as her work of course. This was the first homework for the Soul Restoration class.
This is a representation of my soul house. I won’t go into the details since it’s part of a class and paid content but I wanted to put it here since this particular page is a lot about the art. I loved how Melody used the different colored pages to create a collage so I wanted to try to do the same thing. Trust me when I tell you hers is a ton more stunning but I still love how this turned out.
I added specific truths that spoke to me. The ones that are a lot about my goals for 2011. I’ve made a few more pages for this class so far. And I love the class so if it comes around again, I highly recommend it.
Weekly Art Journal is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.
Again, please bear in mind that the whole reason I am doing this project is because I don’t have inherent talent in this area. The while point of this is to practice practice and practice until I get good. Or as close to good I can ever get.
So with that here are my second set of six portraits.
First set of three drawings:
Remember, I take the drawing photos late at night right before I paint, so they are not the best. But I still like to have them as a before and after. Here they are, painted:
and then here is the next three drawings:
and painted.
I have 300 more of these to make.
Constructive criticism always welcome but only if you can actually be constructive. No need to stroke my ego, I know these need a lot of work. I am ok with that 🙂
Six Portraits a Week is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.
Since I still can’t show my The Girls’ Paperie layouts (coming soon, I swear), I wanted to share with you some of the classes I have been working on and taking. In the next three months, I will be teaching or giving content to four classes and I am taking five classes.
I didn’t arrange for it to be that way. I have an already busy schedule and I would have preferred to spread them out a bit but things work out the way they do for a reason so I am just going to enjoy myself with each of these amazing classes. And if you’re a class-fanatic like I am, you might like some of these too so I thought it might be good to share.
I’ll start with the two I am teaching.
Embrace Imperfection – Starts: February 10 – Duration: 2 Weeks – Cost: Free
This class is completely free and all you need to do is to click on the image above to go sign up. It is two weeks on how to conquer your scrapbooking perfectionism. I talk about different areas where we seem to worry too much about being perfect and how it gets in the way of actually preserving your memories and why you should not worry so much about getting it all “perfect.” (btw, there’s no such thing as a perfect layout.)
Click here to read more and sign up.
Find Your Way – Starts: February 24 – Duration: 8 Weeks – Cost: $39
This class evolved from my layout a day experience back in May 2010. During that process, I finally managed to find my way, my style, my groove, whatever you want to call it. The experience was so exciting, so wonderful that I wanted to create a way for others to find their own unique way of scrapbooking too so they experience the same joy. Having my own way has saved me money and time. It has also increased my joy of creating a page tenfold. And as a side benefit, it has brought me a lot of amazing industry opportunities. In this class, we explore a different part of the scrapbooking process each week and slowly eliminate what we don’t like and discover what speaks most authentically to our creativity. It might sound wishy washy but it’s very concrete. You’re also strongly encouraged to do daily layouts along with the class (though not required.) I share over 80 of my own layouts in this workshop. If this class helps you discover half of what I did in May, it will be extremely amazing. (That’s my hope!)
Click here to read more and sign up.
Those are the two classes I’m teaching. There are also two other classes where I’ve provided material, written an article and recorded a webinar. Both of these classes are for:
Masterful Scrapbook Design – Starts: January 1 and February 1 – Duration: 1 Month – Cost: $10/month
This is an amazing series by Debbie Hodge of Get it Scrapped! It’s an ongoing series of design concepts for scrapbookers. Each month, she pickes a different topic and features four designers and explores that topic using their work. If you’ve ever read anything Debbie wrote, you’d know she’s very very thorough and detail-oriented and amazingly insightful. The January seminar alone was 56 pages!
I have specifically submitted content to the January seminar which is on Journaling (the other artists for January are: Dina Wakley, Paula Gilarde, and Lain Ehmann. And to February which is on Scrapbook page titles (the other artists for February are: Doris Sander, Aaron Morris, and Kayleigh Wiles.) This is a subscription-based class which you can add and turn off anytime and it’s $10 a month which is an amazing amazing deal! I cannot recommend it enough!
And now let’s move on to the classes I am taking:
One Little Word – Ali Edwards – Starts: January 1 – Duration: All Year – Cost: $36
It’s no secret that I’m a huge Ali fan and no secret that I’m a big fan of one little word, so I signed up for this class without hesitation. My goal is to do all the work in my art journal instead of an album like Ali’s doing. I’ve already listened to and finished the first lesson. If you’re into OLW and Ali as much as I am, it’s highly recommended. sign up here.
Stretching Within – Misty Mawn – Starts: January 10 – Duration: 5 weeks – Cost: $100
This is another class I jumped at the moment Misty put it up. It’s a mixed media class exploring drawing, painting, collaging, and writing. I’m a huge Misty fan and when I saw this, I thought she must have known my 2011 goals of drawing and painting more and better. The class started this week and it’s already unbelievably amazing. Sign up here.
Shifting Ground – Stephanie Lee – Starts: January 10 – Duration: 4 weeks – Cost: $75
I took Stephanie’s journaling class in 2009 and I was blown away. I love love love reading her posts and her words are just like little jewels to me. That class had some deep insights for me and changed my life considerably so having another class by Stephanie is a true luxury. If you’re into journaling even in the tiniest bit, I encourage you to take it. Sign up here.
Soul Restoration – Melody Ross – Starts: January 11 – Duration: 6 weeks – Cost: $99
I know I am sounding like a parrot but I am a HUGE Melody fan. Both she and her sister Kathy who are the two owners of Brave Girls Camp are amazing people and deeply deeply inspirational. I have not had the incredible luxury of going to Brave Girls’ Camp so this is the next best thing I can do. Sign up here.
Sketchbook Delight – Alisa Burke – Starts: February 7 – Duration: 4 weeks – Cost: $50
If you’ve been reading my posts in the last few weeks, you’ll notice that I want to learn how to sketch. I’ve been reading Danny Gregory’s books and scouring the internet to find some ideas and techniques. Recently I discovered Alisa Burke’s sketchbooks and I fell in love. Love love love. They inspired me to sketch immediately so I literally squealed with joy when I saw her offering that class. It’s the only one on this list that hasn’t started yet so if you’re interested in sketching, run run run. Sign up here.
And there you are. I hope to see you in one of my classes or one of the ones I’m taking!! If you know of other classes please do leave them in the comments. If you can’t tell, I love taking classes online!
Today’s page is inspired by the amazing Dina Wakley. Nothing nearly as amazing as her work of course.
I cut out a silhouette of me from the photo from the end of the year (with jeans) and then taped it down and watercolored around it. I then watercolored in a different color on the top. I sprayed the circles on the left and drew some stars. There are also subtle, tiny stars inside the body. I sprayed with dark brown on the hearts and then a little drippy india ink and that was it. I am not so happy with the dripping but here we are. It’s all about playing and experimenting after all.
Weekly Art Journal is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.
Ok, please bear in mind that the whole reason I am doing this project is because I don’t have inherent talent in this area. The while point of this is to practice practice and practice until I get good. Or as close to good I can ever get.
So with that here are my first six portraits.
First three drawings:
I take the drawing photos late at night right before I paint, so they are not the best. But I still like to have them as a before and after. Here they are, painted:
and then here is four through six drawings:
and painted.
yep, I have a long way to go. But I am ok with that. I have 306 more of these to make.
Constructive criticism always welcome but only if you can actually be constructive. No need to stroke my ego, I know these need a lot of work. I am ok with that 🙂
Six Portraits a Week is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.
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projects for twenty twenty-five
projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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