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.

Living Dead Girl 2009-2010

It's September of 2009. I'm sprawled across the sofa reading Fahrenheit 451 and listening to one particular Rob Zombie song on repeat one. Somewhere in the house I've got a blank sketchbook and a new set of ink pens. Let's take a look.

Practicing form and shading with my new pens. I am willing to bet these were Faber Castel, I had this set for years before it gave up the ghost.

I accidentally signed up for a martial arts class and got really ironically into it. I believe I said this before roundhouse kicking the kitchen table.

I was (not at all ironically) really into collecting old issues of Heavy Metal Magazine and Hellraiser comics at the time. I really dig this monster dude and think inspiration for him came somewhere thereabouts. 

No one ever hung my artwork on the fridge.

Ok, apparently I was just really into weird ass mutant creatures. 

"it's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine" as I recall this was a concept sketch for a digital collage I was supposed to make. I ended up doing one with a dead possum and a lot of lens flair instead. 

Ok, another weird mutant thing, but more importantly, MY HANDWRITING. I get a lot of flack now for my eccentric cursive being a little hard to read, but it is nothing compared to this nonsense. In some burst of eccentricity I decided to write in a stylized Sütterlinschrift. Thankfully that did not last long.

Half finished ballpoint pen dragon monster.

Oh, this is fun. My grandma and aunt had all these embroidered dish towels and they all had days of the week on them. Of course, it never actually was the day of the week as the towel hanging on the stove. I embroidered my own set of two, one reading "today" and the other "tomorrow" this was my design for "tomorrow".

For some reason, my grandma didn't want this one hanging with all her ducks in dresses and colonial ladies in bonnets. Forget the fridge, apparently my art just is not allowed in the kitchen. 

Two things- I cared enough to wear earrings at this point in time and I was really really over the moon with fractals as a concept, especially these circle ones.

This post is continuing my old sketchbook series, for the previous in the series click ye here.

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..."

that one picture

Do you ever have an idea that you just keep coming back to because it never quite comes out right?

That picture you go back to redraw time after time after time because it is never quite what you had in mind? 

I have one. 

My sister took this picture of me the summer after I graduated high school. It's a thing we used to do. I'm far too short to even dream of being a model and she likes to wear a dumb hat while making me stand in dumb positions and making fun of my eyebrows. So, we did photo shoots. 

I love portraiture and practicing on myself is convenient because I don't have to worry about hurting my own feelings if I make myself ugly. But this damn picture, no matter how much I try to lay it to rest, keeps knocking around in my brain that I want to do something with it. 

I don't have every sketch I did of this picture, but this is one of the early ones. Just a quick and sloppy scribble with water soluble oil pastels. Those were my obsession that entire summer. I actually like how the hair looks a lot. 

A couple years later I got myself a drawing tablet and wanted to do digital art. This was one of my early sketches? tracings? hybrid of both? Probably hybrid of both. I actually made this drawing into a full on paper doll set, it has sadly been lost to the ages.

Most recently, an acrylic and oil hybrid painting. Boy oh boy do I see now why they set up exhibits on artists in stages. 

Between the three of them, I am happy with the hair on the first, the arms and torso on the second and from the hips down on the third. I probably would have nailed it on the third if I had stuck with either oil or acrylic. I mix the two a lot in portraits to get really fun abstract background with the acrylic before playing with oil for the focal point. This ended up a really odd mix of soft and sharp details which is so close to working for me, but doesn't. Which means... I'll be back to this picture again...

Perhaps

I woke up this morning to the ding of a rejection email hitting my inbox and felt an overwhelming sense of relief. I submitted a few poems weeks ago and it has been nagging in the back of my mind that my favorite concept of the bunch could have been done so much better if I hadn't tried to play it safe.

When I took my first ever art class in high school I knew eff all about art. I had a pretty solid understanding of color theory and doodled sometimes, but that was it. Halfway through the semester, we were doing landscape paintings, mine was of a castle in Scotland with a meadow and many trees in the foreground. I settled in a nice pastel almost washed out, non offensive color scheme. My art teacher kept coming by and telling me it was too light, too generic, not bold enough. She finally walked up to my desk, dipped a brush in lime green paint and smeared it across my pastel meadow. "You have to push the values." she reiterated and wandered off.

I sat, quietly fuming, for a few moments before adjusting the rest of the painting to match the awful bright green in the foreground. And she was right, the painting looked much better after I was pushed out of my comfort zone and had to be bold. Once the other values were pushed, the green she had smeared across the painting looked perfect.

I can create comfortably. I can write proficiently without shifting around and glaring at the walls and feeling like maybe I need to wash my hands or sit in the bottom of the shower with a stiff drink afterwards. I can paint and draw without someone adding splotches of bright green paint. But my strongest work in anything comes from those "oh fuck" moments. It comes from the "there is no way I can salvage this, I should just give up" moments and working through them or shelfing the project until I am ready to work through them.

Today when I got the generic, "your work is not right for us" notice I was relieved because I knew in the first draft and concept work of that poem I felt the lump in my throat and the discomfort, and that I edited all of that out in favor of something no one would probably love, but no one could really hate either. And now I have it in my head that not only do I get to rework that poem, but that I should definitely write an entire manuscript of uncomfortable poetry. I have a title all picked out and a million other things I should be doing, but who am I to hang up on my muse?

Which brings us to what I spent all morning doing, because it certainly wasn't actually writing these poems. No, I made a book to write them in, inspired by a sort of poetry manifesto I did several years ago in college.

Much like this go around, I was inspired first with a title. "Perhaps". I made a mini book (about 3.5 x 3.5, 18 pages) from one large sheet of watercolor I had mix media'd. The dirt looking stuff on the cover is tea, incidentally. 

I started with the word Perhaps and just went from there. Any time I got stuck, I wrote the word perhaps again. 

I wrote on the bus, I wrote at the pizza joint I would treat myself to any time I went to the bank, I wrote between classes, hunched over on the sidewalk, pretty much anywhere an idea hit me I was writing. 

This was also before I ever heard of zentangling. Call me a hipster but I was doodling like that before it was cool. 

"Perhaps" never was entirely finished, but some of the content was cleaned up and turned into a 3 part mini zine series a few years later. It should have been about 5 or 6 parts, but I naturally ended up distracted by some other project and now it's been several more years and I don't think "Perhaps" will ever be "finished". 

With that project in mind, but wanting a book that was a little bit bigger to fit a full manuscript worth of ideas in, I set out to make a journal.

I started with a mixed media masterboard on bristol board. I wish I had thought to take progress photos because this was one long series of "oh fuck" moments. 

Initially I had thought I would coptic bind the notebook with the pretty cover, but the idea of the inner pages being boring made me sad, and the idea of decorating a million pages made me bored. Thankfully I had one last piece of GIANT drawing paper to jazz up. 

It was unintentional how much the end color schemes resembled "Perhaps". I like what I like, I guess. 

This is the other side of the paper, before I added some watered down white acrylic to subdue the nonsense. I do have to write on it after all. 

Ah, I missed photographing a few steps after this due to tense moments. The paper and the cover were all still very damp with paint so putting the holes in tore chunks instead of neatly piercing. I added a ribbon for structural integrity purposes and kept going.

The cover turned out perfect. I just need to cut some letters out to stencil the title on once it dries. 

I love how the edges of the pages look. The entire reason I didn't let it dry was to get that damp torn look. I recall now that usually when I make these books I let them dry and then wet the edges again to tear them. Definitely works a little better... 

I need to let this dry about 50 years before I write in it now, but I am very pleased with how it turned out. I can't wait to start drafting my poetry manuscript in the free time I specifically cleared up so I could work on rewriting the two novels I am already working on... I'm pretty sure I don't even like poetry. 

Dragon Mail

A little known fact about me, and a dumb one at that, is that I don't actually like decorating envelopes. I know, I know. I started a mail art blog, I send an absurd amount of mail, I have all the stuff to make great envelopes every time. Hell, I have nearly 40 envelopes hand cut from awesome books made up and ready to go. Yet somehow sending "mail art" envelopes intimidates me. 

Partly it's seeing people complain about "overuse of stickers" (is that even possible?!) or certain themes, or too much or too little white space. Partly it's wondering "what is mail art?!" Can washi tape alone make mail art? Is adding a few rubber stamps mail art? What if I carved those stamps myself?  

Most of all though, when I first started getting into mail I was a lone wolf. I was armed with the book "good mail day" an LWA membership and a lot of free time. I did not get into trading mail art through online forums for a few years. I didn't even realize there was a sect of people trading mail without pen-paling out there! 

These were my wild rogue days of mail art. The stick plenty of postage on and abandon it in a blue drop box sans return address so they "have" to deliver it. Cans of cat food, disassembled cassette tapes with letters tucked inside and tied shut, little theater boxes of candy, wax seals, stencils and dragons. Lots and lots of dragons.

These guys! Circa 2011.

As much as I like having a mail art "tribe" now and the convenience of swapping and all that, sometimes I miss the simplicity and not feeling like I had to do anything a certain way. Everyone I wrote was happy just to hear from me, even with my huge sloppy strips of scotch tape holding everything together and handwriting that was "like trying to read Shakespeare's original manuscripts". Anyone that wasn't didn't keep writing. Simple. 

Since I have a little pile of penpal letters to reply to, and a big box of security envelopes, I decided to go back to my roots and draw some dragons. 

Ignoring the disgustingly mixed media backdrop that is my desk, I decided to go with ballpoint pen and watercolor pencils. Even though I don't have a picture of the original dragon envelopes colored, I know they got that same treatment. 

Besides, watching water magically transform my scribbles will never not feel magical. 

I love that my dragon style has changed so much. The original ones were influenced greatly by medieval style dragons while the newer ones take after the beardie I had for a few years. 

For good measure I did a few snakes as well.

And this inquisitive little beardie. 

This spazzy guy is my favorite. 

Finally I did a little throwback to my old dragon. Trying to mimic my old style and design was not super successful but I like his smug little face anyway. 

 I also happily remembered that I had some dragon faux postage leftover that will look nice glued on.

and the stamp I carved of the late Pancake monster should add a nice finishing touch to the envelopes. I might even have some of the lizard postage stamps leftover to use on these. 

This is my finished pile for today. I'm pretty pleased with them and it was nice to take a step back and do some unobligated mail art. or whatever. I still don't actually understand what even constitutes mail art and probably never will. But these are kinder to my postage budget than cans of catfood are, so I'll call it a win.