This week I started to sketch things around the house as well as playing with collage. I am trying to do something creative in some for each day. I am not putting limits on what sort of creativity and I don’t care if it is bad. The point is that I enjoy the process regardless of the outcome. This is what I did this week. As always, click the picture to see a larger version.
I started with the bench by the front window…
Then moved to the section by the stove, and started to notice how many little pops of red I have in my kitchen.
The next day I wanted to capture the outside of the house. Oddly enough I did a similar view a couple of years ago at about the same time of year.. you can see it here .
Wednesday and Thursday I sketched the pops of red either end of my TV buffet. I have a lot of peace lily plants, and they all remind me of the scenes in Hot Fuzz, and they are pretty much indestructible.
Thursday was a productive day creatively speaking. I did the peace lily sketch above and the two below.
I had an urge to play around with blackout poetry and then the resultant verse was begging for a collage page to show it off.
Continuing the theme of sketching things around the house, I moved on to bass corner...complete with my husbands Fender bass (P bass with J neck) and our subwoofer. I looooove bass loud enough to feel it in my chest, though as one follower on social media reminded me, all is well so long as it has groove, which is also true.
Today's page evolved over two days. I filled the page with the zentangle pattern as I watched TV last night and then this afternoon created the slice and dice poem and collaged it on top of the patterned background.
I am super pleased with the amount of sketching and sketchbook pages I have created this week. It has lifted my mood and sparked more energy to write and work on my book project. It's funny how the chain reaction rolls on. Here's to more weeks like this.
It’s time for a change. I haven’t been nurturing my creative practice nearly as much as I should have been over the past 12 months, and I have a theory as to why.
I had the words sensory deprivation come to me when I was on the rowing machine one day when I was thinking about what 2020 was like. I have struggled to be creative at all in an arty sense. I don’t leave the house if I can help it, so I am not seeing new things, I am not hearing snippets of peoples’ conversations, I am not seeing, hearing, feeling or smelling new things. The inputs that usually spark a thought or inspire creation are missing. I have seen many people in the same situation that have been super creative and sketching and documenting what is happening within their homes etc. I haven’t done that. I have been working from home, so haven’t really had a lot of time for sitting and sketching. I wasn’t furloughed, for which I am grateful, but that also meant that I didn’t have the extra free time that these super creative people did that I was comparing myself to. I was drawn to knitting when the weather was cool…but that is more a meditation than an art at times I think. Note to self: Stop comparing yourself to others!
As you can see from the top two images, I have started forcing the issue, taking a leaf out of Austin Kleon’s book and fiddling with collage when I have nothing to say/draw/paint. It takes the pressure off needing to create something in a particular way. Create for the sake of the process of creating rather than wanting to make something beautiful or polished.
I have also started to take Koosje Koone’s lead and draw the little bits and pieces around the house as a project.
I need to get my mojo back. I need to be proactive in my creative practice so that when I am free to leave the house for any length of time again, I don’t have to start from scratch! Being creative brings me joy, which is something we can all do with a little more of, and something we can share with each other even if we cannot do it in person yet.
Here’s to a more colourful, creative and joy-filled year ahead!
If you’d like to check out last year’s sketches, you can see them HERE.
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Robertson Studios.