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.

Things that made my soul sing last week

Something a little different this week. Not because I didn't do any art, but actually because I did so much art very little of it is done or shareable at the moment. Here's a few things that made me happy and refueled my creative tank between glaring at business tax obligations and slowly chipping away at a 12 x 16 inch realistic cat portrait commission.

Oils. Good lord, oils put some life back in me. I pulled them out to start a large mix media portrait and while I had them out, did a "quick" little painting of my hand on a spare background. I think this is my first oil "from life" and I loved doing it. Note to self. More oils. More oil hands. More oil anything.

Speaking of hands. We went for a long walk downtown and really spent some time looking at a couple of the murals. This one in particular, which of course I didn't take a full picture of, we stood in the empty lot and talked about the technique and what we liked about it and I explained to the kid, approximately, how it would have been done.

We got up close and personal and really admired the little splotches that gave away the fact it was spray painted. And I was in love with the cracks from the paint underneath.

Note to self: buy spray paint. Do a mural.

On this epic of a walk, we passed a tea shop and I mentioned that we could have a tea party for a hell of a lot cheaper at home where it would actually be dairy-free and quiet. So the kid says "Can we have a tea party?" Yes, yes we can.

We got all dressed up and after our tea we were discussing themes for future tea parties. A "retro futurism" themed tea party came up and he called his grandma to ask what she thought now would be like in the 50's. She went off on a tangent about the cold war and how gay used to mean happy and I snapped this very very Norman Rockwell -esque picture. Which I cannot wait for a spare moment to paint in oil.

Finally, it snowed. Which got me all geared up for winter as a concept and, well, was a novelty anyhow. My husband forbade me of posting photos of my snowman on the internet because he's censoring my art, but it was a good time.

Now back to the soup, and the laundry, and that behemoth of a cat painting.

12-17

Continuing my portrait for each year of my life, this post will cover ages 12-17.

twelve-twelve was a less awkward year than eleven but that's not saying much.

I was straightening my hair at the time, or attempting to, anyhow. Thanks to the PNW drizzle, by the time I got to school one side was straight and the other was just crazy.

I am wearing a hoodie my sister had printed for me at the mall and my glasses frames were indeed a pretty awful for my complexion shade of red.

At age twelve I was big into choir, I was in the main one as well as the select one and did some solo contests. I sang rather well, but didn't feel like I fit in very well with the "choir kids". I distinctly remember telling this gorgeous girl a year older than me that she looked like an angelfish. I meant it as a compliment, she did not seem to take it as such.




thirteen-

If we're being honest here, I should have made my hair a lot greasier for this one. I was being really really kind to myself.

At thirteen I was in this advanced algebra class, but algebra is boring so I sat in the back of the classroom and started teaching myself German instead.

There was this guy I was friends with and also had the biggest most obnoxious crush on. After winter break I walked into algebra to find this jacket folded up on my desk with a folded bit of notebook paper which read something to the extent of "Christmas, merriness, new year, whatever".

I wore it every day. Literally every day. I slept in it sometimes. I wore it so much that I can still feel on my arms what that fabric felt like and part of me wishes I hadn't had the sense to let go of it at twenty. 

fourteen-

I could have just as accurately put myself in the German camouflage jacket again, but at fourteen I really did wear this jacket a lot and it was also a bit ridiculous. It's a black faux straight jacket. I would also like to point out that the jester's had was not for special occasions. I just dressed like this.

Fourteen was gold make-up, neon, and hair-dye. It started with dark red streaks, on to bleach blonde, cotton candy pink, Lola Rennt firetruck red before becoming a mohawk which honestly I just bleached out and redyed every two weeks, no use even trying to keep track of all that nonsense.

Fourteen was also when I really got into art. I definitely had kinda sorta drawn a little before, but I had to take art, band, or choir. Band was out because I don't play anything, choir out because I didn't think I'd fit in, so I had to go art. And what a godsend. Fittingly, the self portrait we did in that art class I was wearing this jacket for, it was that drawing that caught the teacher's attention enough to tell me I really ought to keep taking classes instead of just doing the minimum to get the required credits.


fifteen-

fifteen was the year I attempted suicide. This shirt was one of the shirts I had on one of my stays at the mental hospital (the second of the three, I think).

One of the things I remember about this stay was the nurse telling me that she didn't understand why I was there because I was so incredibly polite and well behaved. I told her that just because I wanted to die didn't mean I wanted to make her life difficult. We weren't allowed to have erasers in our rooms because you could self harm with them, but she gave me one because I was drawing constantly in the living room area and she wanted me to be able to during down time too.

There are so many things I could say about this year, but I think that will suffice.

When I work on things like this I sometimes struggle with whether or not to share my fight with depression, and if anyone is wondering why I am sharing it is because I think I need to. Not for me but for all the people who are struggling with depression and at a worse point than I am now. It's important for me not to hide it or act ashamed of it because a lot of people go through depression without realizing how many other people have gone through it. I remember it being isolating at the time that no one talked about it.

sixteen-

When I think of 16 year old me, I don't really think of me. I was still on a lot of medications from fifteen and I guess I just don't recall most of the year very well. The parts I was there for, I wasn't really myself.

I did living history at the medieval fair and enjoyed that a lot. I took art and did a lot of very normal almost bland creating.

It's the year that would get glossed over with a sentence or two if someone was writing my whole life story.

And here is where I say, again, depression is ugly and while I am not ashamed of it, I am not proud of it either. I say this because I know the sentences sixteen is boiled down as I already wrote them in my short memoir.

"These were the summer months of enlightenment, where everything was going to be alright and I was capable of anything. A particularly inspired talk with a friend of the family, who played the herdy gerdy and crafted traditional marionette puppets, inspired me to quit taking my medications..." 

seventeen-

I reiterate that I definitely do not think I made a wise choice at sixteen in just electing to stop taking my medications. I was on A LOT of medications. It was dangerous and stupid, but at that point no one was listening to me saying that I could not feel anything and that my hands shook too much to draw and I was done with it. 

But with that in mind, at seventeen, through will-power and glue and the delusion of invincibility, all the things that I identify as my personality now burst into life. 

I started doing a lot of mixed media art, I did stop-motion animation (mostly claymation) staying up all night in my room so I could control the lighting. I got heavily into photography and would spend hours laying on the patio by the pond photographing dragonflies. I bound books and did martial arts and got in ridiculously good shape and just kept my sock puppet doppelganger, Damien, in my backpack hoping to be prepared to add a little absurdity into the day. 

I was me. 

The previous post in this series covered ages 18-24 and can be found here. 

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.

Mermaids or When I'm being honest

Back in October I was playing along with the whole "inktober"  make something inky every day thing. I'd say it was a particularly rough month for me, but with how often I use that phrase I think it's just kind of a perpetual thing. 

Anyhow, I wanted to pretend to have some sort of inspiration so I could post something neat-o on instagram instead of another fucking hand. I started to go for a very safe, very cliche mermaid. And then I veered wildly off into what chronic depression / anxiety has felt like to me. That I am being gnawed at and fighting constantly no matter how well I look like I am doing or how much creative energy I am putting out into the world.

I came up with this little sketch and really liked the concept. It kept bouncing around in my head and finally last week I had time to revisit it. 

This started with redrawing the sketch with actual human anatomy in mind. I notice I tend towards the same simplified style when I am doodling, which gets the point across for me to redraw it later, is all I can really say about it. 

I tried to de-cute the depression fish monster a bit while I was at it. 

Carved a stamp. I like texture in my stamps, usually, so I tend to make sure to carve neatly so that any stray lines capture the form instead of just being wonky. Same concept as if you were making a drawing just with a bunch of lines, except you don't know for sure which are going to actually show up until it's done. 

Print of the stamp. Also how I realized I really need to buy an ink pad that costs more than a buck if I am going to spend so much time dealing in stamps now. 

I did a test print on a dictionary page. And determined I also need to just get some good printing ink and find where my brayer got off to. 

It amused me, in a sort of sad way, that one of the conversations I had when showing the prints off went like this:

"Look, I made a stamp."

"I see. It's a mermaid."

"Well, kinda. It's a woman being eaten by a horrible fish monster."

"Oh."

"See? She's trying to hold it off so it won't consume her completely."

"huh. She looks like she's doing well and pretty happy."

Which I guess just means I got exactly what I was going for in the stamp. 

place your bets now if next week will be back to pets. 

Where the Magical Mess Happens

I've been blogging and babbling for how many posts and still haven't done a "craft room" walk through? tsk tsk. 

I should have done this back when I first started blogging and had my very own office to myself. Since we got the kid, I have been demoted back to a corner of the bedroom. In some ways this sucks, ok in most ways this sucks, having an entire room to myself was great, but it actually was a good opportunity for me to pare down and thin out. More art work has been created in this little space already because I am not as overwhelmed by all the crap. 

Without further ado. 

My desk.

And surrounding area.

But not the closet where I store all my extra crap because it's terrifying. 

Kabam! It's a desk from Ikea. It's covered in some starts to a mixed media project today. I have no idea why or where it's going, I'm thinking I want to do some smaller scale of the oil portraits on mixed media background I really love doing (we'll get to those in a bit).

Over the years I have been stickering, modpodging and painting on random crap to the front of the desk especially. I've grown quite attached to it and have no desire to trade it in for a less gross desk any time soon.

    

In this corner of my desk I keep a spearhead for no real reason. And the acrylic paint has moved in from its proper home in the closet.

A closer look at part of my ledge. Incense holder, homeless atc's, origami and elephants with their snouts pointed towards the balcony door.

But what's that curtain hiding, anyway?

Oh cool. It's the stairwell.

Some moron decided these townhouses all really needed a half wall in the corner of the master bedroom. I'm not even joking, the kid and I tried to recreate this townhouse in the SIMS and the SIMS wouldn't let us put half walls here. The mother fucking SIMS knew it was a stupid idea.

Anyhow, the blackout curtain and having a stereo helps a lot. Eventually I am going to paint on the curtain but haven't gotten to it yet.

More of my ledge. Mascot, business cards, the scissors mug. The "queen of fucking everything" mug was an anniversary gift from my husband. We're romantic.

My chair is an awful little folding chair with the cutest quilt my mum sent me for Christmas last year. I have a list of things I aspire to own if I can get a few more commissions. A colander, a decent chair and windex are at the top.

Also shown here is newspaper on the floor, that's where prints or whatever go to dry when I am working on things. Which is pretty much perpetually right now.

One of the things I really loved about this desk when I picked it out was the built in shelves. On the bottom front are my manuscripts, kinda, mostly, some of them.

On the top shelf in the front is an assortment of books I use often for reference. The main bookcases both live downstairs. Most of these are writing books... scratch that, all of these are writing books except the book on Dutch. I just don't tend to use art books that much if at all. 

Most importantly. The crap on my wall to the left of my desk.

This is where I pin photographs and things I get in the mail that I really really love. I have had one of these walls at every place I lived and every time I move I get to take it all down and start from scratch. By the time we move from here, I expect the entire wall will be solid.

It's also where the paint towels live and the little mirror. The taco monster is my earliest in tact drawing, my grandpa had it laminated and my mum found it in his desk after he died and gave it to me.

I also have two kinda giant paintings up. They're my favorites I've done and really a style I wish I worked in more often because it feels the most like "my style". Heavily textured mixed media backgrounds, grungy details and muted portraits in oil. That's what I aim to do with the (much smaller) canvas that's on my desk right now waiting patiently for its next layer.

Another week, another blog post.

p.s. getting two photos side by side should not require swearing, googling, weeping and satanic rituals, blogger. get your shit together. 

The Goddamn Dishes

On October 31st, 2014, I lived in a one bedroom apartment with my husband a bit south of San Diego. There was a hostage situation involving midgets 2 blocks from our house and the dishwasher didn't work.

My sister started to poke at me that November was National Novel Writing Month and I had to do it. I had to. Had to do it. Had to. Being the good little sibling I am, I told my husband to ignore the dishes in the sink, I was going to write a novel.

So I sat down at my desk and started writing the first thing that came into my head, loosely based on a memoir I never wrote, a short story I never finished, a dream I had and some mysterious notes I found on my desk one afternoon that had been preceded by some serious shower vodka. I finished that novel, and then the next issue arose.

I did not want to edit.

So I wrote a new novel, that, conveniently, could allegedly be read before or after the first novel and either way would give new information and revelations, which sounds ambitious, but is a fancy way of making sure I had an excuse not to polish off the first novel, because naturally they both need to be open at once.

And I finished that novel.

And I still did not want to edit.

So I painted, did the dishes, went to the dentist, got help for my severe depression, completed EDMR therapy, started a garden, found some semblance of religion, taught myself to crochet, moved to another place where the dishwasher also did not work, started buying paper plates, started a blog (hello!) and then I started to rewrite and edit.

But there was another problem. I needed to write a sex scene and I could not get through it without sitting arm's length from my laptop and making a constant ewie eew eww ewwwwwww face. So I practiced for a week until it felt natural so I could go back and do those rewrites on my novels. Armed with all the knowledge I needed...

I started another novel.

I broke my personal record and hit 50 thousand words in two weeks and lost interest.

So I did the dishes, took a vacation, started the process of obtaining my very own child, wrote the end of the novel, hated the novel, started learning Dutch, deleted half the novel, got the child, moved to Oregon, made the child do the dishes in the dishwasher that actually works...

and finally finished the novel.

So where is this going, you may wonder. Did Met start a fourth novel? Is Met announcing that one of her books is out in the world for people to read? Are they looking for beta readers? Moving to the mountains to be a hermit? Promoting child labor?

No to all of those.

I started a fucking etsy.

Here's the link if you are interested. The link is here if you aren't interested too.

I'm going to try to get back into blogging. I lost this last month to NaNoWriMo, the four day hangover that I experienced after Halloween, some depression bullshit, setting up business stuff and apparently partnering with my friend at Pawsitive Pooch Training getting artwork done for their office space.

To thank the 5 people who read my blog and play favorites, until the 23rd of November, 2017 you can use the code "GODDAMNDISHES" to get 15% off your order. It's our secret. shhh.

All my productivity is just thinly veiled procrastination...

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?