the voice in your head doesn't have to breathe

so it can just keep screaming non-stop. Try it. The kid and I agree our internal voices sort of scream inwards when we breathe so it goes AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh with each exhale/inhale.

Anyway. Watercolor a day continues.

Monochrome, hand and prayer beads.

My usual supplies.

Quick and intuitive.

I spelled dandelions wrong, first time I tried to do the writing I called it a daffodil, so I just kinda gave up. The skin tone was actually helped by the fact I was using the last of my earl grey tea instead of water to mix/ rinse.

I spend a lot of time hanging out of my balconies right now while I wait for a call. Sometimes I paint or write. Sometimes I try to get the ferret to enjoy the great outdoors with me (he always goes flailing and chirping back into the house)

I also painted this little painting of a border collie in a shower cap. Just to get myself to do something besides wringing my hands together.

And that's my week-ish. That and poems and small batch chocolate chip cookies. 

Has it been a year?

April 5th, 2017 I pulled out a sketchbook with a few half-assed drawings and shopping lists in it, tore those out and started actually keeping a sketchbook/low key art journal for the first time since high school.

Now, a year later, I filled my third (fourth, if we want to acknowledge one of the books was done both fronts and backs).

It was a trip flipping through all the pages last night. There, in sloppy sketches, short notes, little pictures, was the full last year. Roadtrips, early character sketches, pie journaling, child obtainment, court process, the great 2017 migration, bad days and good days and holidays. It felt impossible at the time for me to even finish the first sketchbook, I'm really happy now I started then.

Anyway, here's a few highlights of this sketchbook.

No cover-art this go around, save for this derpy lil dragon. No title either. Just straight into it.

I did mostly watercolor again, but I used it in a lot of different ways and styles.

I caught a few memories that had been floating around in my head.

And started a project illustrating and recording my dreams. 

The dream paintings, like everything else, didn't stick to one style either. This is my favorite one of them, I think, for how understated it is.

I drew/ painted/ carved a fair amount of skulls. "Memento Mori" was probably written/painted in here more than any other phrase. I spent a lot of time meditating on the transient nature of life and detachment from self the last few months. Which has somewhat helped in my creating, as a person paralyzed by the idea of perpetuality, it feels a pressure off to live in the moment and not focus on always attempting to make art of eternal great importance. Ironically, in accepting this, I have created more artwork that I think I will still find important years from now.

And sometimes, when I was not busy basking in the comfort of my mortality, I found time to draw some dumb shit that makes the kid laugh.

More dreams. I liked this one a lot, very loose and dream-like.

I took more time to paint from life as well. The kid plays some beautiful music and I sit on his floor to paint a lot and just spend time in proximity of each other. It's nice. He lets me pick out sheet music for him to learn, which is an endless source of amusement.

We even took a trip to the park and I painted the little coffee shop building there. I had no idea I would love painting buildings so much.

Still at the park, a quick study of the ground and the sky.

The last page. 

I've been thinking a lot lately about the little red pump by the pond in my grandparents' backyard. I would spend so much time playing with the pump, using a cottage cheese container to pour water in and pumping my arms frantically to try to get the water flowing. I felt like that pump this last week, like I just needed some water and faith and flailing to get myself going and where I wanted to be again. And that maybe I need to accept that sometimes the pump will dry out again and I'll need to start over again with my cottage cheese container and flailing.

Art Escape (Celebrating Forever) 2013

 Ah, 2013. Going to college, way into mail, lamenting the fact I did not do as much art (or writing!) as I used to. The perfect conditions for an art journal to emerge into existence.

Unfortunately, the best pages in this journal are way too personal to want to put online. Like holy shit. So let's snoop at a few tamer ones.

Oh hey, what's that on the cover, is it that one picture?

The first page, to be contrary, was a collection of reasons I didn't think starting an art journal was a good idea. My favorite one: "Journaling is for self-important assholes who draw too many self portraits." eeyup.

Crane your neck and squint. So much texture on this page. The mellow background is so rare for my work, I love it.

I used to paint and draw a lot of peppers. Why peppers? I'm allergic to most flowers. The stamp I was testing was for... I don't know what it was for. I know for a fact this juxtaposition was to make good use of space and not intentional content wise, but it's a pretty good snapshot of my personality at the time, whatever that means.

This page cracks me up. The exercise was from a book on journaling (not entirely sure which one). I have no idea what I had against ascots, or business law, or half of the things that make up my "inner critic". I will chalk up the anti-starbucks sentiment to being a Seattle-ite coffee snob though. 

This post is a continuation of my old sketchbook series. For the last installment, click ye here.

Deep Dark Secrets + Happy Thoughts

So some fucker keeps making posts about her goddamn comp books and after enough posts about them and obsessing over how cool and fun it looked, I decided to make one...

under the conditions that I was a) not keeping it and b) not blogging about it. 

The last thing I needed was to be self conscious while I worked on this bullshit, especially since I have been posting so much of my art on instagram. Actually working on this project made me realize I have to cut back on that, even at the cost of not being as "present" on social media. As much as I don't do well in a void, I don't do well without my void to retreat to, either. 

The reason I didn't want to keep it was the same. I wanted to be able to put whatever I wanted in it without worry about who around the house picked it up and read it. Without worrying about myself reading it. 

With that said, here's the cover and the 6 pages (out of 40+) that I am ok with sharing. It's been sitting under my desk in an envelope for a few weeks now, I really gotta get it mailed off.

The cover. This comp book was a Christmas gift, otherwise I would never have just had one on hand and therefore never done this project.

Learned a few pages in that you really need to tape 2 pages together or you get bleed through awful. I should have just bought, idk, a fucking sketchbook.

Also. I go through a stupid amount of black watercolor.

There are definitely a good few completely silly pages. It is Deep Dark Secrets AND Happy Thoughts, after all. I lost my shit the entire time I was making this page. Still lose my shit looking at that mug sometimes.

Over arching theme.

This magazine clipping will never not make me laugh.

Stamp tests.

And the truth. I have always had a really weird hatred for comp books, probably the standard size, thin pages, boring covers, unforgiving binding, weird warping if you look at them wrong. But in a way, I actually enjoyed all those things while working on this. I liked that I had to tape pages together, I liked that it getting fucked up and crinkly and weird was inevitable, I liked the obnoxious lines through my drawings. It kept it casual.

I want to make another, or else adopt the lax nature into my written journals.

Probably not in another comp book though.

2018: Let Go & Thrive

People keep telling me about their word of the year. I admit, I thought it was kind of a cop out the first few times I heard the concept. Like an ambiguous word doesn't really have that much tangible accountability. Mind you, this is coming from someone who schedules eating 3 meals a day into their planner to make sure I don't go flailing off track, so don't take it as me being snobby.

But this year I set a word. Thrive. Which, more specifically, is making efforts to change my mindset from "survive" to "thrive". And the first step to this, because of course I am breaking down a word into steps, is LET GO.

I am endeavoring to let go of my ideas. Especially with my novels. I keep having these dreams of being a ghost and I realized it is because I have been writing in a vacuum, trying to make everything perfect to me, 3 novels worth of perfect, before doing anything with them.

I decided a few nights ago that I am going to focus my work on the main novel, the first one, and leave the other ones in the closet (so to speak) until such time as the first novel is published. If I want a break on the novel, I can start something completely unrelated. But writing a trilogy all at once before sending out any queries on the first one is insane...

But I was doing it because I need to let go of my fears too. I need to let go of my need to be validated. Need to let go of the idea of rejection being a bad thing and embrace that rejections mean you have been trying. And need to accept, that at the end of the day, it is ok to do some projects that are just for me, as long as they are not for me, forever. Because at the end of the day, art and writing exist to be shared, not hoarded.

Horace the Grotesque is actually looking for a forever home, if you really love him. 

Finally, I need to let go of some of my expectations for myself as an artist. I am, at my very core, an eclectic person. My art is eclectic, my writing is eclectic. There is no one style I could stick with and be content. I like to stencil pleasant pop art doggies. I like to make horrible creepy grotesque masks out of paper clay. I like to do painstaking realism paintings in ink. So many artists I follow you can scroll through their instagram feeds and they have a brand, all their content looks pleasingly similar. Mine looks like it was run by about 15 different people. And that's ok, having a "brand" is ok, so is not having one.

I need to let go of that nagging itch to compare myself to other artists.

----------------

"remember that you will die" (and remember that first, you will live.)

Happy 2018, procrastinators.

another sketchbook

My blogging habits have been abysmal lately. I've been busy as fuuuuuuuuuuuu and by the time I remember to blog it's Monday already. 

I finished another sketchbook. Or, kinda finished it. I flipped it upside down and backwards and am working on filling the backs now. 

Without further ado. My favorite pages. Apologies for overlap with the hands post because damn I like some of the hand pages. 

This was the first page. I did it quickly at the park while the kid and the husband man were playing frisbee. 

Sometimes I journaled a bit on the pages. Like about my many toads.

This was a family affair. Everyone took turns drawing us people. I will never get over my husband's stick figures.

As my entry suggests here, I've actually taken to scheduling art time into my planner. Either by setting goals for x,y,z art project each week or just scheduling in some ME time. I think I averaged about 2-3 pages a week for this sketchbook, which is not bad considering we got a kid and moved nearly 1000 miles in that time span.

I took my field watercolors out on a lot of walks. The kid would lay on the ground listening to Fall Out Boy and I would paint. Lazy summer indeed. 

I did more goofing around pages this journal too, including imprints and abstracts and splotches.

I found a style I was happy with and thought would be my style forever. And then have since moved on with my life and am doing mostly simple line drawings and stencils again.

These watercolors, though.

Some days were really rough. Art was a great distraction.

I found my old spearhead while I was cleaning and keep it on my desk now. When my desk is clean, it is the only thing on my desk. My family thinks I am weird.

More hands, bloodhound gang lyrics, because I am a lady of class.

This wonderful thing happened. My phone started giving me countdowns for how long until it was supposed to start raining and hot damn that tickled my fancy and imagination.

Another page done during our travels. My husband, same ol' style I love.

Trying to do more drawing again. After the move things got kind of fucked up as far as art went but I am trying really really hard to make sure art doesn't become a big deal again. The last thing I want is to be intimidated by a blank page, so sometimes I draw even when I don't want to.

Baby-sitting this fucker for a friend. She is less than impressed with me.

And finally, near the end I took a moment to go back to my roots with bold lines and topless ladies. I have done a lot of art lately that I don't consider my passion and I have to try to remember to still make time and find balance for things I enjoy too. It's rough.

And that's the highlights of this sketchbook. I've made a few other things lately I hope to space out posting, so fingers crossed, same time next week?

Only Rabbits 2011

It is 2011. I am all about the ladies, science, aquatic life and poetry. The title here taken from Saul Williams' book ,said the shotgun to the head where he writes "i cannot make your past disappear, only rabbits my love, only rabbits". 

Sketch of an angler fish that later became a watercolor painting.

Cover idea for one of my earliest zines, although not what I ended up going with in the end. 

Ladies, fish, ladies who are fish...

I always love the pages where I know I got a new art supply. Here I am first trying out water-soluble oil pastels.

And continuing to have fun with them with some loose sketches of women.

Self portrait. Big hair.

This here, is a formative page. I did a series of sketches of the same general idea and after I had settled on one, I photocopied it and turned it into one of my earliest stencils.

Which I consider to be one of my most iconic stencils I have made to date. I went through a lot of spray paint that spring...

More stencil play, the door was opened.

Oh, this bad joke.

"And when in doubt, draw a lizard."