18 - 24

I had one of those moments a couple weeks ago where I was lying in bed just kinda zoning out and staring at the creepy monkey mask on the wall when suddenly a thought hit so hard it stuck. 

I was going to do a little self portrait of how I pictured myself for every year of my life. I started at 24 and began to work backwards thinking I would get about three done before getting bored. I ended up getting all the way down to 7 years old in one sitting because I was having that much fun. 

I posted little sets of four on instagram as I finished them, but realized I put enough effort into these damn things and they amuse me enough I want to properly blog about them. They are all atc sized and done with a 5H pencil and watercolor. They are also almost all entirely from memory (I made two special exceptions so far that I will note as we get to) but I would have to say they are pretty spot on, I would know, I was there.

Without further ado, here's the first batch of portraits- age 18 to 24.

eighteen-

I took a lot of self portraits at eighteen because I was huge on photography, especially portrait photography. Wide eyes and parted lips was kinda my "signature" self portrait look I tried to capture here.

Although not pictured enough to be obvious, I know the t-shirt I'm wearing is a concert shirt from Rammstein's Liebe ist für alle da tour because I wore that shirt as often as it was clean.

At eighteen my life plan was to become an accountant and spend the evenings sitting in the windowsill of my studio apartment, chain smoking and drinking gin. I was going to still pursue art and writing on the side, but felt planning on being an accountant with a drinking problem was somehow more sensible than applying to FIDM, San Francisco like I really kinda wanted to.

nineteen-

Two quarters into college I realized how deeply apathetic I was about business calculus. Not bad at, mind you, I was always great at math, just utterly apathetic to. Teamed with the fact everyone in the world was going for an accounting/business admin degree I switched to a general associates of arts & sciences.

To celebrate that I was not going to be an accountant, I cut and bleached my hair and got a huge tattoo of an anglerfish/dragon hybrid on my calf.

I'm smoking a candy cigarette here and I cannot exaggerate how many of these I went through. I almost took up actual smoking because I thought it might be a laugh but asked not-yet-Mr. Me what he thought and he said if it was all the same to me he'd rather I didn't. We had just started dating and wore matching gnome necklaces.



twenty-

This is one of the portraits based off a photo. On our wedding night we stayed at a bed and breakfast, the owners had a thing where they liked to take photos of all their guests when they arrived and give them copies at breakfast.

The photo they took of us cracks us both up to this day because while it is clearly us, somehow we both look about fifty thousand times better in the photo than we have ever looked in real life. Like it's a photograph of a couple of movie stars we are merely stunt doubles to.

From the photo you would never guess that my sister super glued our hands together while she was helping me get ready or that I broke the knife while slicing the cake or that we didn't have the foresight to ask someone to prepare a toast for us so we made the guests play "nose goes".

twenty-one-

Twenty-one was a pretty rough year. I don't remember a lot from it since I was struggling with depression most of it.

This was the year we got the late Gerald(ine) Pancake. She's passed out under my pony-tail here, which she very often was at the time. She would crawl up there when it was just about time for her to go to bed and nibble on my hair before passing out.

I'm wearing the same shirt I was at eighteen because I am the worst at ever buying new shirts.

But the important thing about twenty-one year old me was that I loved that weird little lizard very much.

twenty-two

The year in which I pierced my eyebrow and got a big ass octopus on my shoulder.

Pancake and I were pretty damn inseparable her entire life, so of course she's in my hair again here. She used to come to the pet store (on a leash, chilling on my boob) and without fail, every time, someone would come up and tell me that she blended in perfectly with my hair.

Twenty-two was a better year than twenty-one. It's the year I started writing daily again and also the year I finally got some help for my depression.

It's also the year I would hang my head upside down to comb my hair for extra volume. If you think this is an exaggeration I definitely do have photographic proof of my hair getting this big at times. I can only speculate that I was using my 80's hair to shield my fragile psyche.

twenty-three

At twenty-three, we had to put Pancake down.

The fact is, Pancake's toes were falling off when we first got her. And I know adopting a sickly animal is idiotic, but she picked me. The second I walked by the reptile tanks she ran up to the glass and pounded her fist against it like she was yelling "Yumin! Ay need yu! We's mayd for 'chother!"

We needed each other. On the worst days of twenty-one and twenty-two that weird little lizard was my reason to keep going. Someone had to feed and water the lizard. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but when you're struggling with depression you cling to what you can.

I took it pretty hard and when I take things hard I cut my hair. On a lighter note, it sure was nice to not have to schedule washing my hair ahead of time anymore...

twenty-four

Well, this is me now.

I look like this, no snarky commentary because I still think it's a good enough idea to look like this that I choose to every morning.

The shirt I was wearing at eighteen and twenty-one is cut up and on an embroidery hoop as I type. It's so well loved I'm outlining the design so I can put it in a cute hoop to hang on the wall. Otherwise, I would still be wearing it. This shirt has triumphed as my favorite and happened to be what I was wearing when I started this.

I don't know what to say about this year yet except it's the year I am really truly getting back into art and (knock on wood) I'm feeling more like the person I want to be than I have ever felt before. So that's pretty cool.


Next time (erm, eventually) we will leap further back in time to judge my bad hair styles.

Sketchy Business

You guys... 

I did it. 

For the first time in a good 8 years, I FILLED a sketchbook. And I didn't just fill it, I filled it with drawings and doodles and good stuff. No grocery lists. 65 pages of arty ridiculous random goodness. 

I tried to pick my top 10 favorite pages but I like them all, so here's fewer than 20 but more than 10. 

I regret nothing, title wise.

This dude was a preexisting condition. I don't know how many pages the sketchbook originally had because I painted over the cover, but when I pulled it off my shelf I did tear out a handful of grocery list type notes and pages with loads of eraser marks and faint lines. Dragon here stayed to guard my contact info though. 

Page One! I know I already wrote a post about this page but it was a solid start and I'm still happy with it.

The earlier pages (which I skipped over a lot of, apparently) just had the date and a note about the media used to do the page, as the book went on my notes got crazy and random. Like this page where I detail a weird dream I had.

I was gifted a set of drawing pencils and played around with those a bit trying to get back into it. I'm definitely a fan.

Snail friend crawling back into his shell makes this for me.

All the watercolors in this book I did with my crayola educational tray that has been knocking around for easily a decade. I know that's not exactly the epitome of fancy, but I wanted to force myself to practice mixing colors instead of always running to my hoard of watercolor tubes. Turns out I really like the results better when I mix myself and the tray is a lot less hassle to tote around.

There were a handful of pages that really tipped into proper "art journaling" as in, journaling happened. And a lot of song lyrics. I guess this is proof I *can* write in print. I just hate it usually.

An exercise posted in the mail pals instagram group daring us to stamp with weird items around the house. My husband didn't even ask when he saw me slathering paint on a corn tortilla and giggling in the corner of the room. He knows better by now.

Speaking of. Trying to draw my husband is like a 30 second drawing challenge. My sketching is getting faster, my man drawings are getting better.

One of my 30 days of pie and journaling pages. I absolutely love the way pilot precise pens bleed into the watercolors.

As it says, a lesson in lightening the fuck up. Meaning, I can get pretty caught up in trying to make things look realistic and forget that exaggerating is half the fun and that actually having fun is the other half.

Self portrait done in about 10 minutes. The whole point of trying to get back into art for me has been trying to make it something I can just do whenever instead of an intense ordeal. Mission Accomplished.

This might be my favorite page in the entire book.

And I caught the elusive Mr. Me long enough to sketch him.

The exercise in taking myself less seriously is never ending. So here's a quickie of the house lizard puppet.

And the back cover. 

So that's a sketchbook full. I have another one to start from my hoard of notebooks which might end up being a drawing/journal hybrid. 

Whooooo knooooows?

Pie Journaling

I see a lot of hashtag challenges floating around on instagram and I think they are all super dumb.

Ok, not really. I think anything that gives people the extra motivation they need to be creative is awesome, but I, personally, have never been a huge fan of oddly specific daily commitments. I already made a post babbling about doing things every day earlier this month, so I'll cut to the chase.

Things are dumb and hectic and stressful here in my little corner of the world, so I need something silly and something to look forward to doing daily. Some ding dang ME time. Which is why for the next 30 days I am committing to eating pie and journaling every day. I already journal every day, so really the commitment is to eating pie.

I'm inviting people to join me in this venture by using #30daysofpieandjournaling to tag your pies and pages on instagram (or wherever else you can tag shit, let's make this a thing!)

Literal pie is preferred, but any sort of self care works. A nice cup of coffee, sushi shaped into the form of a pie. Hell, go ahead and take your journal into a bubble bath (and bring your pie and coffee with).

I have a blueberry/raspberry pie to get through before I make another, but next on my pie list is either a shoo-fly pie or a meat and fenberry pie (or both at once). I also have intentions to make quiche, chocolate silk pie, perhaps a frittata or two, maybe even one of those hamburger tater-tot pies (if I can think of a non dairy substitute for cream of mushroom soup...). 

Anyway, this is my official announcement and fair warning that I'll be talking a lot about pie for the next month. It's really amazing we got this many blog posts in before something dumb like this happened...

Let's Jam

Steph and I decided to do a bit of a postcard jam between us. We've done a few collabs together, including some absolutely fantastic artbooks (which, she thankfully blogged about because I was not on the blog train yet). It's always fun to work with her because our styles are so different. We overlap at mixed media with her super powers extending to collage and mine extending to uh, drawings of half naked ladies and lizards. You heard it here, folks, that is the spectrum of art.

Anyhow, setting out to make backgrounds I wanted to do something she will hopefully be excited to work on. I thought: bold colors, lots of layers, repetition, abstract. 

11 x 14 inch mixed media paper. I started off with a dodgeball pattern in a tasty rainbow of gelato sticks. The hashmarks are totally an homage to the fact she uses them on everything.

I then promptly destroyed the hashmarks. I blended the gelatos using the tea bag from my tea because I was too lazy to get up care deeply about recycling and reusing materials.

Flowers stenciled on in black. The stencil was made for my mother's day cards this year and was its own ordeal.

More stenciling! Some white acrylic sponged on over a torn strip of paper.

I added a few more layers during a phone call (speaker phone is a godsend) and forgot to photograph them, but I cut a circle out of paper and sponged around that with white and then used black and grey to redefine some of the original flowers. After those layers dried, I coated everything with gloss varnish and sprinkled a tiny bit of charcoal glitter over the top. I sponged the glitter lightly to make sure it was embedded in the varnish and will hopefully not emigrate to Steph's floor.

I ended up with these 6 roughly 4 x 5 1/2 backgrounds to send her way. I am really happy with how they ended up looking and excited to see what she does with them. Unfortunately, I was reminded, yet again, that gelatos do not play well with, um, any other art supply. The paint and varnish are both fairly prone to peeling because of this and they got a tiny bit distressed during trimming. I imagine by the time Steph is done with them though, they'll be sturdy enough to survive being hoarded forever mailing into the world.

My Rage, My Rage 2009

Let's get this out of the way right upfront. I name my journals and sketchbooks (at least, the vast majority of them). Titles are all over the map, inside jokes, sarcasm, reoccurring themes, bad memoir titles, disembodied song lyrics... I have been doing this for at least a decade and it just so happens in May of 2009 I was listening to a lot of Stabbing Westward and this masterpiece of a song inspired me to title my sketch book "my rage, my rage..." If you think this could not get any more adorable in its angstiness, I'd like to elaborate that I was listening to Stabbing Westward on a giant blue brick of a portable cassette player. In 2009...

Anyhow, I am working on cleaning out my office and came across some old sketchbooks and sketchbook pages. I thought we'd take a little trip down memory lane. Starting here in 2009. 

Self portrait. This is a page I remember doing because I remember sitting on the love seat holding that mirror in one hand and drawing with the other. If the angstiness of the title did not give it away, my pudgy little baby face gives away my youth here.

It's a ding dang recipe for almond fritters. I was doing living history (historical reenactment of day to day life) for the year 1376 at the time and food is a very important part of my life.

Oh, shit. My hat. I had this hat, it was orange and pink and white and with this braided tail on it and I wore it everywhere and every day. I also was really inspired by Egyptian Mythology at the time. I remember I was reading through the Egyptian Book of the Dead at the time, although I do not remember any of it.

"Like an airplane over the Bermuda triangle, he disappeared inside me." I still have not written a better worse line for an erotica. I peaked too soon in my ironically bad smut writing. You will also notice at this point I was already using "Oblivion Spin" for things, that itself may be a story for another post...

Half finished sketches are my favorite. 

Oh gee. I remember doing this page because I was visiting my bio mom and she was PISSED to walk into the kitchen to find me sitting at the table with a dead bird on a paper plate. It's ok though, I am pretty sure I manipulated it with disposable chopsticks. 

A sketch I did in Eastern Washington sitting on the roof of an old broken down car. I actually started writing a memoir about some of my trips over there, including the trip where I drew this, but ended up scrapping it (would anyone be interested in reading some creative writing posts on here?). I like that in the upper right there is a blank spot where a binder clip was holding my sketchbook open.

I seriously love this page. So much going on. 

 "I'm more beautiful without you, any of you..."

Every Day

May 6th of 2015 found me filling the last two pages of a journal I had been nursing my way through for 10 months. I cannot tell you what exactly catalyzed my rage that day, but the last page ends with this paragraph:

"The lack of failure has made you feel good about yourself

 when you should realize it means you haven't been trying."

I continued my entry on into a new journal, and I have written every day since.

I write... a lot.

I didn't know at the time I was going to write every day. My initial goal was to just try to fill a notebook about once a month like I used to, just to try to get myself writing again. After that notebook was full, I started another one and somehow I just kept coming back to my notebook every day until it became clear that writing daily was just part of my life again.

Most days I write in my journal, if I am working on a bigger project I type on my laptop, occasionally, I pull out my typewriter. I write about my day, I write about the weather, I write about food and conversations I overhear and lizards I see basking. I write poems and rants and novels and scenes that have no defined characters or context. I write lists of words, I write haikus and excuses, I follow prompts and record my weird dreams. Over the last two years my notebooks evolved from plain black pen to illustrations and shit glued in and millions of obnoxious colors, but the important thing, the only thing I care about, is that every day, I write.

Some of my writing I share with the world (like my blog posts), some of the writing I hope to share with the world eventually (like my novels), but the vast majority of the writing is just for me. I write to get all the ideas out of my skull so I have room to think of new ideas. I write to record the things I want to remember. I write to get better at writing. I write because I like how my handwriting looks on the page.

I write because I am drunk and have "too much chapstick my face".

Now, I have failed at many daily projects before. Of the three times I have tried to "make something every day" I got 170, 45 and 30 days consecutive successfully before everything went to shit. I have tried smaller projects where I only managed to get a week into it before failing. Doing things every day kinda sucks, so I wanted to share how, exactly, I managed to actually pull it off this time with a few tips.


How to do start doing something every day
if you're me
which you probably aren't
I'm no expert, but this is how I do things

Define "Rules" Clearly 
(but leave wiggle room)

Before you get going on your project, figure out what counts towards your goal. If you are aiming to make art every day, what counts as art? stick figures? finger prints? shadows?
Is your goal based off of showing up? spending a certain amount of time on your project each day? producing a certain amount of work?
Leave yourself some wiggle room, but do not be too broad or aimless.

"Making something" every day failed for me because every day I had to struggle to decide if breakfast counted- with no set boundaries for my goal, it did not really mean anything. At the same time, do not set such lofty goals that you are doomed to fail. You probably won't make an 8x10 oil painting every day, you likely won't fill a new journal every week. Do not set yourself up for failure.

Consider What "Every Day" Actually Means
(the toothbrush rule)      

If you asked me what I did every day, writing, eating, and, brushing my teeth would be the first things to pop into my head. Admittedly, in the last two years there have been days I missed doing all of those things. Days I was too sick to eat. Days my jaw was too swollen from oral surgery to open my mouth and brush my teeth. Likewise, there were days I did not write. But that doesn't mean I do not eat, brush my teeth and write every day.

Make Time, or Don't
(take advice with a grain of salt)

Some people swear by writing/making art/ whatever at the same time, same spot every day. They carve out a chunk of time and it is just their routine like someone might eat breakfast at the same time every day. This has never worked for me, so I do not do it. If you are the type of person who thrives on structure, do it. If you're the type of person, like me, who gets discouraged if you miss a scheduled time to the point of not doing at all- don't!

Same with every other bit of advice people give about starting and maintaining daily projects, if it works for you, you aren't doing it wrong. If it doesn't work for you, do it differently.

Spice Things Up
(doing things daily is tedious)

Join challenges, challenge yourself. Try new things, set little sub goals, find accountability buddies who are working on similar projects.

Share prompts and inspiration with other people, go outside your comfort zone. A million ways of me saying- do not let yourself fall in a horrible little rut because it can make something you love a horrible chore.

One of my favorite writing spices is doing informal events with other writer friends. We agree on a goal or theme (poetry, sex scenes, dialogue) and at the end of the week report back with how we did.

Keep Inspiration for Later

You will not always be inspired. Even if you keep showing up to your workplace, you make your creative routine, some days you will draw a blank. So when you are overflowing with inspiration, leave yourself notes for later.

Compile the things that resonate with you, make playlists of those songs that sound just right, set aside ideas for later, collect images and anything else that makes you feel something. I keep a little writing cubby for this purpose with books, trinkets and mascots that I keep coming back to when I need a push.

Some times when I have too much inspiration I set up notebooks for future use, I go through and add the quotes and images and prompts that inspire me.


Share
(but not too much)

Support and accountability is great. Especially with art or visual daily projects. It can seem like a great idea to commit to posting your daily drawing or whatever online until you hit that day where ding dang damn this painting looks like shit and I don't have time to do another. or ding dang damn I just am drawing a blank no matter how much I work on this thing. Don't put extra pressure on yourself to produce something shareable every day. Just putting the effort in is enough, share when you are happy with what you created and let the rest fester on a dark shelf knowing you still tried.

Know When to Stop

I was going to say, go as long as it makes you happy, but if I believed that I would have quit writing on day two. If you find yourself not getting anything out of your daily habit, consider changing it so it works for you. Some days it might feel like a chore, but if it consistently is something you loathe doing, stop!