stamps, watercolors, coldbrew, and other crap on my desk

Let's make this snappy because I am running on a borrowed laptop, minimal sleep, stolen time and too much caffeine. 

Postcards!

Hand carved stamps, I have a drawer full next to my desk. 

Working on an 11x14? chunk of mixed media paper. I painted very rough shapes and colors in watercolor for each stamp. This was all totally freehand and wonky, how I like it.

This kept going.

And going... I kept the stamps nearby so I didn't forget what went where. 

Finally stamping over the rough painted parts with black ink.

Added some wonky pen lines and littler stamps to fill up the awkward space between stamps.

slice and chop and we've got 8 postcards.

Hoping for another miracle this week in the form of me actually finding the time/energy to send these fuckers off to all some the lovely people who have contributed to the teetering pile of mail on my windowsill. But I won't hold my breath.

Bob Ross

I don't know how or why, but me and the kid decided we were going to paint along with Bob Ross. I'd never actually watched Bob Ross before more than the stray clip. 

We started out gathering our supplies. I opted for acrylics because Kid hasn't used oil before and I am not ready to go down that road. I pulled out about 5 different as close as I had to the colors he was calling for before declaring "fuck it, go get your watercolor tray. I don't care this much."

We regrouped, on the sofa with watercolors.

Bob already had some shit painted on his canvas so we did that.

boom. done. happy little cliff.

Bob said to add yellow, so we added yellow. The man goes crazy fast and we were not prepared. We paused. A lot.

Happy little cliff and also sunshine?

We had this down. Cliff. Yellows. Addin' in some red. When fuck. fuck. fuck.

Bob wants white. WE'RE USING WATERCOLOR, BOB! DON'T DO THIS.

I suddenly remembered that gelatos work fantastic with watercolor so I went flailing across the room to the tea and art corner and grabbed the box. "Here! These will work!" I exclaim and start manically rubbing white in my sun.

"Is that chapstick?!" The child exclaims having completely accepted that I just had a box of chapsticks I keep under the tea kettle to rub on my art. "Does it work? Why are you using chapstick?"

The chapstick works.

Bob went crazy and started adding some bullshit purple clouds all over. He promised not to do anything without us and flipped over to a clip of his baby squirrels. When he cut back to his painting Bob showed himself to be a fucking liar because he added clouds in all sorts of crazy ass places.

and then a bullshit wave?

I trusted Bob's word and did his happy little rocks and all that, but I wish I had left the cliff alone.

end result. Not bad.

We got cocky and decided we'd do episode two with just gelatos for the kid and watersoluble oil pastel for the me.

Bob started with this.

Tree details, looking promising.

annnnd. nope. nope. nope. no thanks

I think I'll stick to my hands and leave landscapes to the Bob Rosses of the world. My sofa is covered in weird bits of pastel now, it goes nicely with the thinking putty that got mushed in the sofa and the ink stains. until next week...

Suffer for Craft

When I was 18 I had this running joke that “when I grew up” I was going to pursue writing and art on the side and that, after long days at the office, I would come home, sit in the windowsill of my studio apartment, drink gin and chain smoke cigarettes. “I don’t smoke or drink but I believe in suffering for my art.” I would always add. “I believe there are few things more artistic than lung cancer and liver failure.” This running joke went so far that I spent my first two quarters of college studying to be an accountant. It ended abruptly when I realized how deeply apathetic I was about business calculus. 

By a twist of fate, I ended up as a housewife. While I have plenty of time to pursue art and writing, the windowsill is too tiny to perch on and we don’t have any gin. Somehow I doubt sitting in a cushioned swivel chair sipping tea and chewing candy cigarettes is suffering by any stretch of the imagination. 

I wasn't joking about the candy cigarettes. My sister was kind enough to send a carton for NaNoWriMo.

Cozy and full of cookies and bonbons and other stereotypical housewife foods, I decided tonight I would suffer. Not for art, not for writing, not for calculus. Tonight I suffered for craft.

I try to avoid crafts. We don’t do cute tea lights in mason jars with raffia tied around them to light up the porch table. We don’t even have a table on the porch. There are no rustic “Welcome to Our Home” banners cut from Tim Holtz construction paper and threaded with hemp. No faux succulents planted in gold picture frames. No heart throw pillows with our faces and wedding date printed on them, or coat hooks with our initials or corkboards made of actual corks. For the longest time our only Pintresty item was a flat black canvas with green ombre lettering that read “WELL DOUBLE DUMBASS ON YOU”. It has since been joined by a tea holder made of clothes pins and cardstock.            

I wasn't joking about this either. No jokes allowed on this blog.

I have nothing against crafty décor in theory, in fact I am all for it, as long as it’s just a theory. When people tell me how they made x,y,z thing for their house or post all their mason jar creations I smile and nod.

But I suffered tonight. I suffered for craft because of a photo my sister sent me.

It was a collage of three photos, no words; it didn’t need any words.  The first photo showed a Ziploc bag of felt scraps in analogous colours. The second showed a few coiled around each other with a glue gun off to the side. The third showed a finished shoe mat. A really cool, simple, felt shoe mat. I was sold immediately, and picked up three big sheets of felt the next time I was at Daiso.

It was going to be perfect; I would finally have something to replace the rice bag I was using to hide the stain in the carpet and for a fraction of the cost of buying one wherever you even buy mats at. I had just recently gotten my first glue gun since mine had been confiscated at age ten and I was in love all over again.

I started on it tonight as a way of unwinding from a stressful week. I measured the felt into one inch strips, which immediately somehow warped themselves into weird 3/4^th inch on one end 1 ½ inches on the other. I free handed the rest of the strips (all 4 sets of them before I got bored) and they turned out slightly more uniform. So far, so ok.

I put on some relaxing music and coiled my first color. And added a few strips here and there. I glued and squeezed and bent and rolled. The glue kept squeezing out onto my fingers; there were slight gaps between the felt layers, not a big deal. I kept going until an hour had passed and I got a glob of very hot glue on my thumb. I decided it was time to take a break and reassess. 

oh. well... I guess...

Time spent on project- one hour. Progress on project- maybe 15%. Blisters- one on my thumb. And the project itself? covered in glue globs and weird hair like glue strands, some of which may be actual hair too, because who knows. Is it the worst thing to ever come from my crafting? Certainly not. But the more I stare at it the more I know if I admit defeat I just wasted an hour and ten bucks and if I persevere I stand to waste up to 6 more hours on it… for something that will get shoe stains on it and be next to impossible to clean due to all the ridges and crevasses.

You can suffer for art, you can suffer for writing, you can even suffer for business calculus, but if you’re suffering for crafts you are probably doing something wrong.

note: this post was written a year and a half ago, when I was thinking of starting a blog but decided not to. I left the post mostly as was, but will add the epilogue that the shoe mat was thrown in the trash bin in a wave of defeat. Further more, the Double Dumb Ass On You wall hanging was covered to say "fuck yeah potatoes!" because my husband hated it. He hated that as well, so the canvas is patiently waiting to be covered in not so subtle vulvas and rehung in the kitchen.  

Days late, Dollars short

I was thinking, briefly, of taking a blog hiatus for the summer, but two days past my first missed post and I realize I actually like the normalcy of posting weekly. 

I've been doing a lot of little creative projects these last two weeks, but not taking lots of pictures. Half because I forget, and half because they aren't that exciting to me. Doing them is fun, fulfilling, whatever, but they feel like nothing to write the internet about. This week, here are a few things that are exciting to me.

This snail decided to live on the sliding glass door.

For some reason we made a rainbow cake. By we I mean I made the cake while the kid took pictures for snapchat. It tasted like fruitloops and, if I had had the patience to actually let the crumb coat chill in the fridge for a bit, probably would have been beautiful. I would like some credit for the fact I do not actually own any cake tins, each layer was done in a pie dish.

I saw this lizard at the park. Actually I saw a big ol' snake and my people pointed out the lizard right by me. Mr. Me "humorously" pointed out that it was a good thing it wasn't a snake or it'd'a bit me.

I got a proper new sketchbook. Tried to start one that I had on hand and was not spiral bound but I hated it. I'm trying to do some quicker looser pages to catch memories instead of accuracy because life isn't very good at holding still.

We went to ikea and I got new paint towels. I think it has been a good two or three years since the last trip. I made it out without buying any stationery, stuffed animals or posters of pancakes.

At one am just as we were agreeing it was time for bed, a blob flopped into the kitchen doorway. Apparently we have a backyard full of the cutest little toads now and one snuck in.

Unfortunately not pictured, but a final one for the road.

We were sat on the sofa writing, I was struggling with dialogue and glanced wistfully up and out the window to consider it and what do I see but two bicyclists towing a statue of a rhinoceros on wheels with two more bicyclists following. CCR's "Lookin' out my backdoor" pretty immediately springs to mind right about now...

(and this is why paintings and mail catch-up did not quite seem so blogworthy this week)

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.

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?