Cats in bed

I recently received Carla Sonheims lovely book "Drawing Lab". It's labeled as a drawing exercise book for mixed media artists. I don't draw much, except for girls. I have not shown many (or any?) on this blog so far, but if you go to my flickr you will find plenty of girls there. I have always drawn girls ever since I was a child, so I suppose it's in my genes. ;-)

I thought it might be interesting to see a book where drawing was not looked upon so...what's the word...precisely (?). I am not really looking for rules and regulations. I have a great admiration for people who can draw things meticulously, but I don't want to be one of them. Drawing, like all art, should just be fun.

So when Carla's first 'lab' asked me to draw 30 cats in bed I just couldn't resist!

Yes, I actually took a sketchbook to bed and drew cats! Really really bad and really really silly cats. It was a blast and it was also harder than I thought, because trying to think up 30 different cats in your head is not as easy as you might assume.

Believe me, I know they are not great drawings at all, but that's so not the point. The point is that these weird looking cats were fun to do and I am thinking about turning one of them into a little painting just for the heck of it. We'll see. Also, one bad drawing is just that: a bad drawing, but a whole collection of them is quite funny to look at.

Another thing I am working is the following piece. Again on paper:

It's not finished yet, but I thought I'd show it to you anyway, 'cause I like the colors so much. As you can see it is still taped to my drawing board. A lot of people seem to be into spray painting these days and looking at all that stuff made me want to bring out some stencils again and also get some new ones. Now, no spray paint was used here. It's mostly regular acrylics and one color of glimmer mist (I don't see it glimmer by the way, did I not shake it well enough?). The base of the piece is neocolor mixed with gesso. It is fun to layer all those things on top of each other. I have already some papers picked out to put over this and I think I will add some ephemera and/or writing as well. I'll show it to you when it's ready.

More journal pages

I finished the last of the three spreads I showed as works in progress a while ago. It's interesting how I get these positive responses on the other two spreads I showed yesterday. This just proves to me what I have known for a while: that what we think of our own art has very little to do with what others will think of it. This is simply because we were there for the whole process and all the thoughts and feelings that went with it and the onlooker just sees the finished product or some stages. Even if one were to show the entire making of a spread on youtube, you still would not be able to get inside the head of the artist. I am really fascinated by this idea of onlooker versus artist and how they perceive the work that was made.

Anyway, here's the finished spread:

I like this one the best of the three that I did in this Kelly Kilmer style. It is, just like the other two by the way, not based on any of the prompts that she gave in her online class. It is simply about the thing that is always the hardest for me and that is to surrender to life and whatever it brings. They say you should know the difference between the stuff you cannot change and the stuff you can change and only put your energy in the latter. But...the stuff I cannot change is exactly what drives me up the wall and makes me mad as hell! Well, I never said I was sane. ;-)

After I finished this spread I had a little fun with one of the prompts Kelly did give. For those following the class: it is prompt 13 (no, I am not doing them in the correct order). This is a childhood memory and it shows a not so pleasant part of my personality:

It's about me kicking a little child and not feeling guilty about it at all. In my defence: I was six or seven at the time and the kid was a pain in the ass who just wouldn't let up. He suffered no permanent damage by the way, but I may have wished it upon him at the time. ;-) I am by no means a physically violent person, so the memory has stayed with me all my life.

Apart from the subject I really enjoyed using paint in my journal again. It's a very simple page. The picture of the naughty little boy I found on the internet by searching for...yes...'naughty boy'. As expected these key words also brought on some erotic stuff (of mostly naughty girls by the way, go figure), which made me laugh. Sometimes the internet is just so predictable!

Some work in progress finished

About ten days ago I showed you three spreads that I was working on in my ALMBH journal. Two of them are now finished. I am only moderately pleased with them, but that's mostly because I liked them so much without the journaling. I do not feel I improved on their overall impression. Sigh...

This first one is about life as a dance or a game. I had already started a little journaling when I first posted these pages. I also added some ribbon. I am absolutely in love with all sorts of ribbon and lace and I love putting it in my art. I guess with these pages I am trying to tell myself not to take life too seriously ;-) A thing that's always easier said than done by the way.

I like this one better than the previous one, although I think I should have done my writing in black instead of blue so it would stand out more. A lesson for next time. I like what I did to the girl's face and I loved using the tape right across the page that says "I love you". This spread is kind of a remix of the sentiment on the previous spread and I also added some writing on how one can be too busy with being 'special' or 'different' instead of just enjoying the normalcy of what you are.

It's kind of interesting how some art can leave you a little bit deflated. That happened to me after finishing these spreads where I simply expected way too much. But other art can just pleasantly surprise you like the colorful work I did on paper last week. I definitely want to explore that colorful nonsense a little further, it was more play than anything else. This kind of proves what I am trying to say on the above journal spreads: I should not take my art or my life too seriously, nothing good can come from it, haha! ;-)

Still, a little disappointing art is always better than no art at all!

More play and some leftovers

The journal art I showed yesterday really got me going and of course I had to make more! So yesterday I got out a second sheet of paper and put another piece together.

Can you guess that I like bright colors? ;-)
I again used many different materials but the coolest thing to me is the red heart. It is a colorcopy on watercolor paper of a wooden heart that was once a gift with purchase of a home decorating magazine. My first idea was to use the wooden heart itself on the piece, which looked really good. But then I got to thinking that maybe I would like to frame this paper one day and then the thickness of the wood would get in the way. So I decided to colorcopy it. My plan is now to sometime in the future make a similar style work on canvas and then use the original wooden heart on that. 'Real' things do add something extra to a piece of art I think.

Just now as I was clearing up my worktable again from all the remains of these two paper works I found some left over collage material that I had taken out to use, but didn't. They were just a book page, a cut rose and a cut butterfly and for some reason I felt the need to put them together to form a very small collage that I will probably paste in one of my journals.

I added some lettering and crayon and that was that. It's very simple and I don't even know if one could call it art, but I like how you can put some scraps together and still come up with something that's nice to look at. Better than throwing it away!

A special shout out to my tenth follower! I feel so silly saying this, but just one of you is a complete miracle to me. Thanks so much for liking my blog (that also goes for those who respond outside of the blog). It helps to know there's a small group of people that I am not boring to death with my artsy ramblings ;-) I may not respond to a lot of blogs, but I love looking at other artsy blogs myself.

PS: it may interest you to know that the book page in the 'left over' piece is from the memoirs of Casanova! Very apt I think!

And now for something completely different

For the past few weeks I have been in total art journaling mode. I love art journaling and I love working on books. But I'm nothing if not fickle and I really needed to do something different yesterday night. Since I cleared my table it was easy to pick up something else and I decided to do some work on a sheet of paper. I got out my big drawing board, taped some thick acrylic paint paper to it and got to...PLAY! Yay!

My, did I have a good time making this! I felt like a kid in an art supply store! ;-) My only challenge in this one was not to use any realistic pictures and just do something more abstract.
The size of this piece is 32 x 41 cm (12 1/2 by 16 1/8 inch) and the paper is cold pressed 400 g/m2 ( 190 lbs). It is absolutely beautiful paper and I was lucky to get it on sale a while ago.
I used just about every art supply at hand, from gouache to acrylics, from mechanical pencil to artist's brushpens, foam stamps (I love my foamstamps) and even some scrapbook embellishments.

It also got me thinking about something I've been wanting to try for a while and may have succeeded at with this piece and that is to get the art journaling out of the art journal. What I mean by this is to make art on different substrates that is still art journaling. I think I like to call it journal art ;-) This piece of course is all about play and the making of art because I love it and for no other reason. That's why it says on the bottom right "Just for the love of it" and that's the title I have given to this piece as well.

Now especially for those who were in awe of my beautifully cleaned work table and studio:

The beautiful cleaned up look lasted for a whole sixty minutes and that was only because I had to make dinner. Otherwise it would have lasted for about sixty seconds! As one creative person once said somewhere on the internet:  "I cannot be creative and tidy at the same time". Ain't that the truth! ;-)