PAINTING
Hi friends! I’m getting closer to the Creative Canvas Festival and I’m still making new art to show. Here’s a few more things I’ve painted!
This is a 5 x 7” painting. I love those little Lucky Cats (I have 3 figurines in my office, a lucky cat tattooed on me and I’ve draw many versions of them before) and this one combines the colors I’m vibing with and the 3 eyed characters I like to draw.
I also like drawing hexagons and bees. The colors are very strawberry lemonade. It confuses my brain a little, because it makes me think of honey too.
Another magnet! A purple moon.
Another landscape. I changed up the colors.
This is also a magnet! It’s a 3 x 3 wrapped canvas. I love sunflowers. :) Perhaps inspired a bit by Van Gogh’s.
PREPPING
I’m taking some stickers with me. Some new, some old.
I originally did this painting in March of last year. I was thinking of this being with an overflowing cup. The vines were meant to represent growth. At the time I painted it, I really felt like I was seeing things differently, including what my heart wants.
I decided to change her up a little. I got rid of the green, added a HEART in her heart space, and added more twinkling stars and sparkles.
Processing
One thing I’ve really leaned into this year is prioritizing alone time and space for myself. Each day I get up, do 10 minutes of meditation and 10 - 25 minutes of yoga. I usually take care of some of the daily chores then spend another 10 -30 minutes writing. I started writing a little bit last year after reading about “morning pages” in The Artists Way by Julia Cameron. One of my FB friends posted about how intention and writing transformed her life and how she was putting something together to help others experience that too. I joined the Write It Real Experiment in November of last year and it kicked off on January 1st. Check out more information about W.I.R.E. here. I’ll probably make a whole new blog post dedicated to how that’s been going for me and how powerful that’s been for me. I definitely needed to process some thing through writing and art. I had this canvas I had no idea where it was going. I started to write on it in ball point pen whatever was on my mind. Some of it good, some of it bad. I just wanted to out of my head and onto the canvas.
Gonna be vulnerable here. This is a very raw photo of me. I was not feeling my best and I cried as I wrote words on this canvas.
I wrote, rotated the canvas and wrote more. I wrote on top of words. It doesn’t matter, I just needed to get it out.
After I wrote and cried and wrote a little more, I drew on top of the words then started to paint. The words still bleed through and I guess that’s okay. I have an image in my head of what I want to put here. This is all I have so far. The thing about art is that it’s a process and sometimes it’s really ugly. But the making of it is therapeutic and that’s really what I wanted to accomplish here. I honestly don’t care that this piece looks like a mess and I don’t even know if I’ll finish this version of it. I might just paint over it again and write more words on it. Because this piece isn’t meant to be beautiful or perfectly depict an image. It’s a process piece that I’m using to help me heal and release some shit. It doesn’t feel great or wonderful but a part of me knows that THIS is the kind of art that NEEDS to be made, and won’t be the kind of art you see being pushed by any social media algorithm.
So yeah, that’s what I wanted to share right now. Thanks for reading.