"Artify": To make arty; To imbue and beautify with art. "Heart": The center or inner core of one's being. Thus, to "ArtiphyTheHeart" is to imbue the inner core of one's existance with the beauty of art.
I'm a curious and creative explorer of the world, currently working in book arts, collage, mixed media, fiber arts and acrylics. Each day I try to share a snippet of my life and musings through a piece of artwork, and every once in a while I spice it up with a pinch of practical wisdom.
Yesterday I promised to post a page from one of my sketchbooks, so here you are. One of my watercolor heart milagros. I love milagros and I have sketchbooks filled with them. Especially heart milagros. I keep lots of dedicated sketchbooks, and I have a special sketchbook filled only with milagros del corazon.
I browse all sorts of places looking for special milagros. When I find one that speaks to me personally, I usually make a quick sketch with color notes then finish it in studio. Sometimes I snap a pic--if photographs are allowed. Especially if I'm in a hurry or if there are lots of them I like. Then I work from the pics when I'm with my materials.
I end up with pages and pages of resolved sketches of single items. Charms. Little miracles. A pleasant exercise without the bother of backgrounds or composition.
The first ten minutes of this page can be seen HERE. I finished it with multiple layers of collage and warmed it with an overstain of tinted walnut.
I keep a lot of different types of art journals, but I use my collage journals primarily as a means of exploring color, pattern, and composition. I have no problem combining unrelated materials, and I consciously try to mix whimsical mass-produced commercial elements and magazine pages with my own artwork and lettering. It's a playful, experimental dialogue between things from my hands with things from the hands of others. I work with these and other types of art journaling pages as a daily exercise, and they are for the most part, what I choose to share on this blog.
I plan to begin sharing more of my other work, maybe as soon as tomorrow. Not finished pieces of art. I don't put those on the web, and have no plan to ever do so. But I keep lots and lots of sketchbooks, and I have some favorite subjects that I revisit so frequently that they each have their own books. From time to time I think I'll pull pages from these sketchbooks and let you have a look.
But for now, today's page is enough. Feel free to click on the image and enlarge it so you can read what I've written. One of my favorite artists, Katherine Dunn, posted a quote from one of my favorite books yesterday on Facebook, and it fits the theme of this page so serindipitously. The quote is from Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez:
"He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over to give birth to themselves."
How appropriate, since the theme of my journaling deals with discarding childish ways, embracing adulthood, and growing ourselves as an on-going process that is not an angst-ridden death to play, but is instead, a liberating process of gaining new insights, refining abilities, developing talents, discovering endless new avenues of productive pleasures, and enjoying the increasing freedom that is earned when we choose to take adult responsibility as opposed to chaining ourselves to youthful pranks and displays of power.
To grow ourselves, we are indeed obiliged to give birth to ourselves over and over .
I was blessed to grow up with parents who eschewed limiting ideas and behaviours.
I remember coming home from kindergarten and complaining to my father that Kathy D. told me I couldn't do something on the playground. "You can't do that," she said.
And my father answered very simply and quietly, "That's ignorance. When someone says you can't do something, they're just showing what they don't know. There is no can't".
So I told my father, "Tomorrow I'm going to go back and tell her that you said I can."
And he answered, "No. That won't do. It's about ignorance, so she won't understand. She'll argue, and that's no good. Let it always be enough that you know you can. Just go about your business and ignore the can'ts. Life is full of them. You need to let them be and just keep going. If you pay attention to the cant's, you won't see the cans."
It wasn't about defying authority. I knew the difference between can't and shouldn't, or may not. It was about CAN. And being told that I should quietly go about knowing that I can, made all the difference. It gave me the motivation to learn new, difficult things and the patience to wait for things. Why rush just to give up? Especially when you know that you CAN. So what if it isn't today? You CAN.
I learned a third exercise that many people don't think to do. People think to stretch their bodies, and people think to stretch their intellect. But most people don't think to stretch their capabilities. Even if they don't know it, they're stuck with the question, "Can I? Will I be able to? Until you answer that question with a yes, you're a member of the billions club. You're part of the billions of people that don't try until they're sure that they can. They don't know if they can, and they're afraid to try until they know.
I learned the answer to that question in kindergarten, but that doesn't make me special. Anyone can learn it anytime they want to.
(This pic above is page 24 from MYPL. The stencil is from yesterday's post, HERE)
One of the things I quickly discovered while cutting this stencil/mask: When cutting your own stencils by hand with an Xacto knife, the edges are really important. You have to pay careful attention to the intersection of horizontal and vertical cuts. It isn't enough for them to just meet each other because you risk frayed corners if the edges don't intersect.
Cutting text is good practice. It helps prepare you for the combined straight and curved lines in artwork. I could have used purchased stencils, but I wanted the practice. And I like that I can control the look when I do it myself. In an Art for Elementary School class I took in college, we were told to emphasize to students how much their drawing would improve if they practiced improving printing, script, and penmanship in general. I think this extends to cutting letters with an Xacto. If you practice cutting letters, your stencil cutting skills in general will improve by leaps and bounds.
Do you recognize this page? I started it a while back and posted about it HERE.
The first decision I made when designing the stencil for this page was where I wanted to put it. This art journal very conveniently has 8-1/2" X 11" pages. That means that if I cut the area which will receive the paint from a separate piece of printer paper and I position the cuts carefully, the stencil I cut will also successfully mask out the rest of the page. Once I decided where I wanted the letters, I drew the letters in a type style that I thought would look good on the page. Cutting out the letters proved to be quite easy.
Here are some notes I took to ensure the success of future projects:
Make sure cuts intersect at corners
On some curves it's easier to turn the paper than the knife
Fresh, new blades. Always.
Clean, unblemished cutting mat
No day dreaming! This is not the time to lapse into the zone!
Remember, you're pulling the knife, not pushing it. All cuts are on the pull.
I used Liquitex low odor acrylic spray paint in medium magenta for this stencil. The layer of acrylic spray on top of the printer paper reinforces and strengthens it with a light coating of acrylic polymer. You end up with the best of both worlds: A very easy to cut sheet of paper which becomes more durable after it has been sprayed.
I think the top pic of the stencil cut from the paper is actually pretty cool looking. I'm sure it will find it's way into another journal page soon.
Why? Because some days all you have at your disposal are a pencil, a piece of notebook paper, and a post-it-note. And you have to do something creative. And sometimes you're in too big of a hurry to bother wiping off the eraser bits before you scan and post. But that's OK.
...in everything is knowing what to keep and what to throw away. That includes knowing what to say "yes" to and what to say "no" to. And what to focus on when you read and which words are just there to hold the others together. And what to eat all of and what to leave on your plate. And who to hold hands with and who to run away from.
They all--everything, that is--begin with an idea, and that idea can be distilled into a "this or that" format. Once it's this or that, the wisdom is in knowing which to keep and which to throw away.
A hint: Never, ever, throw away your freedom to decide. Always keep that, no matter the cost.
A very different kind of page for me (MYPL p.18), but I was determined to stretch my wings.
It began with the upside down hat, which of course needed something pulled from it. Owls. Wiser than rabbits. Maybe just one owl. And typed text. Typed on tissue. What to do to offset the sterility? Funky block letters. As imperfect as I can make them without crossing into the "messy as crap" zone. In pencil. God how I've missed pencils! Graphite is good. Scribbled in with markers.
If you have an old typewriter at your disposal, I urge you to use it! I have my mother's old Royal. It's cast iron and heavier than the table it sits on. I moved it to my work table a couple of years ago so that I'd use it. Finally! I can't believe it took me this long.
I didn't realize the date until I went to schedule this post, so I changed the title. Happy birthday, Daddy!
One more page journaled over collage. You can see the almost naked page--the collage only version--by clicking HERE. And if you missed the page I posted yesterday and it's progression, you can see that by clicking HERE.
It isn't whether or not you liked it better before, or if you like it much better now. It's about the process of art journaling with collage and the choices I make while working. There's no right or wrong way. It's just how I work. Like the thousands of recipies for sugar cookies that are out there, but you developed your own, and you make yours this way, as opposed to all the other ways. And they all taste pretty good--more or less.
This particular method of journaling over collage is taught by Kelly Kilmer. This page is #9 in the series from her workshop: Marvel: Your Precious Life. Lots of new ideas there, and also some new ways of applying the old ones.
Some of the pages in my diary-style art journal are simply made up of random bits of stuff like doodles in a phone book. Doodling with everything: pens, markers, even the collage.
Sometimes these books end up a lot like the books in high school, when you doodled around the pictures and text in notebooks and then stuck stickers in the book and glued, stapled and taped stuff on top of it all. Totally unplanned. Spilling it all on the page for no other reason than to put it there. Nothing's really finished in these books, nor is it unfinished either. It's just there.
Perhaps what I've done with the pages of this book is more along the lines of K&Company Smash 365 Folio style. But I've been doing this for years and years and years in books I've made by hand, and Smash books are a new product that's partially already put together. With Smash books, you don't so much make it, as finish it. Still, I think they're a lot of fun, and I think I probably want one.
At any rate, the pages above are from the same book as the page in yesterday's post.
When I make books, I make so many books. So many radically different styles, bindings, and designs. Some are serious, some are whimsical, and some can't be catagorized at all, and they don't need to be. But sometimes it helps to have one book for one thing, and one book for another. Any way you look at it, it all adds up to lots of books. Containers, really. Containers of artistic expression. This book is a container for the doodles of my life, and most of those doodles are bits of collage.
The page above is from one of my "Everyday" journals.
I keep several visual journals for different types of things. A couple of them, like the pages I posted yesterday and the day before, are introspective and deal with thoughts and issues. This page is more fun/utilitarian. It's pretty much a chronology of what-happened-when, so it's on the lighter side. Every once in a while a particularly heavy day will creep into the book and I'll let loose. But for the most part, it's just a who, what, where, when, why.
If you're interested, you can see the covers and the binding by clicking HERE.
Here's one more page from this book.
A card in a magazine I was flipping through inspired my St. Lucy, so I had to draw her. I was on an art date with my friend Rita and the only plain paper I had with me was a sketchbook that was not meant for water media, as you might be able to tell from the scratched up fibers in the background. Once I figured this out, I decided to collage St. Lucy and outline her with my Rapidosketch. This worked much better.
All the pages in this book were pieced together from various papers and images before the signatures were sewn into the book. The duck and cranberries (they're really jelly candies, but let's pretend they're cranberries...) on the page at the top were already there when the book was bound months ago. So were the papers and the red bench in the second picture. It happens so often that what's already on the page lends itself perfectly to the theme of the day. It isn't planned. It just happens that way.
Just playing. I wanted to see how hard it would be to add some hand stitching to something in a spiral sketchbook without ripping out the page. Not difficult at all.
This evening was the final teleconference for the Creating Time Mega Event launching the book Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life by Marney Makridakis. I've attended all three, and I must say that I've had more fun, met more people, and been introduced to more new books and websites than in any other webinar I've taken part in.
In each of the three events, we've doodled clocks. Instructions were to take moments instead of taking notes. So I recorded the pregnant pauses as well as the salient points while I looked for the metaphors. I listened intently, watched a video, composed a group poem, and adjourned to small groups twice for discussions. All this over a period of an hour and a half, all the while doodling my clock and taking notes moments.
At the end of the webinar, I was surprised. I really hadn't looked at the paper I was doodling on in the process. I was on autopilot, expanding time by layering my activity, my attention heightened and present for listening, moment taking, doodling, and coloring, all at once and equally present, all happing at once within the same moment in time.
Who says time isn't pliable as putty? Here's what I discovered I had done by the end of the evening: Not a piece of art, but a cohesive collection of ideas, colors, pattern, and metaphor. A surprising outcome for someone who was present in so many places at the time the drawing was taking place.
Quite different from multi-tasking, this was a free act of letting the hand do it's work while the brain watched and listened. The words "Creating Time" and the date were added afterward. Everything else was done while participating in the event.
So I wanted to take the time to share this with you, and let you know that I highly recommend the book, Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life. It's filled with insights, activities and wisdom from the more than 80 artists, creatives, authors and other luminaries who contributed to this effort. Yesterday was its release date on amazon.com and it hit #1 in sales in numerous categories. I'm not surprised.
If you're interested -- and who wouldn't be? -- in celebration of the book's overwhelming success on it's first day of release, the special offer I mentioned in yesterday's post has been extended until April 24. You can find out more by clicking HERE to read yesterday's blog post, or by clicking HERE to sign up for the offer itself. There are more than $125 worth of fabulous and absolutely free items and perks, just for buying a book you'd want to own anyway. I know, because I took advantage of it and spent hours downloading all the fabulous morsels and tidbits, which include e-books, online courses, audio recordings and more. Really. What are you waiting for? This isn't a sales pitch, it's my own personal opinion. As they say, you snooze, you loose, so go for it!
At the beginning of the month I committed to another of Traci Bunkers 30 Days Of Get Your Art On, And I have gotten my art on each day since the first of September. Actually, since the first of forever. What I haven't done is get my blog on.
Time is scarce. Really scarce, and reading and drawing aren't going to be what gives, but something has to, so for a while, it's daily blogging and the social networks. No big deal. The important things are getting done, priorities are in order, and that's what counts.
So I thought I'd give you a glimpse of what I do when there's no time to do anything.
A pack of post-it-notes, a pencil, and the memory of one of my all-time favorite artists, Joan Brown. Joan had about a 150 different looks, different expressions, and even her face changed shape over the years, as if her bone structure was shifting gears. She was a tremendous inspiration.
I first used a computer in the early 80s. The first one I owned was a Timex Sinclair. The first computer language I learned was BASIC. I've been online continuously (read: daily) since the early 90s. I'm equally Mac and PC savvy, and I evolve with the updates. I'm no stranger to social media and can carry on conversations about most of it before it hits the public airwaves, although I am picky about what I use personally because I'm not out to collect widgets; I want what works for me. I like keeping my knowledge complex, but my experiences simple.
So where did I miss the boat on feed readers?
Yesterday I started using Google Reader to organize my online reading and news. I spent the afternoon creating and refining subscriptions and making files to house sites I visit daily, weekly, etc. I took a break long enough to grab my moleskine and put my ducks in a row.
Then I went back to the reader to catch up on what I've been missing by haphazardly cruising online without a navigator. What a time saver!
Now I'm off to broom my internet files and bookmarks. I've accumulated a lot of trivia and it's time to bin everything that isn't useful. In the process, I've reacquainted myself with some great websites that had gotten lost amongst the rubble. Big, clean, deep, breaths of fresh air!
Not too long ago, Diana Trout published her book: 
style. But I've been doing this for years and years and years in books I've made by hand, and Smash books are a new product that's partially already put together. With Smash books, you don't so much make it, as finish it. Still, I think they're a lot of fun, and I think I probably want one.
by Marney Makridakis. I've attended all three, and I must say that I've had more fun, met more people, and been introduced to more new books and websites than in any other webinar I've taken part in. 
