Letting your inner child out to play

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities."

Dr Seuss

I haven't posted here for a couple of weeks. I kind of lost track of time and I'm not sure where the time went. I guess most of it disappeared into family stuff, school visits, etc. Next week will be the first week of a two week school holiday for the kids, between terms, so I thought I'd better post something now while I've got some peace. It can be quite funny proofreading something I've written while I was also talking to the kids about something else but it doubles the work really :)

For the past two weeks I've been reading through a few mixed media and drawing books from my local library, taking notes and trying out some of the exercises. Quite formal exercises. Today I was going to do the same thing but I just couldn't get into it. I wanted to paint something more fun and less lesson like instead. Luckily I borrowed an excellent book called "Drawing Lab for mixed media artists" by Carla Sonheim with the other books. It's a great little book filled with quick exercises to get your creative juices flowing. I'd spotted a fun sounding exercise in it and today seemed like the right time to give it a try. This is a link to the book.

http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Lab-Mixed-Media-Artists-Exercises/dp/1592536131

The exercise was to help release your inner Dr Seuss. The idea is to flick through a few of his books to get a feel for his style and then draw something of your own in that sort of style. It was a lot of fun and I drew a few houses in our street. My house is the pink one with the dangerous looking stairs (I broke my foot on them back in February this year). My neighbor's house is the blue one down the hill and so on. The spiky trees are our cabbage trees that grow here in New Zealand. I totally had fun with this and was feeling pretty happy with it when my son walked in from school and said "Dr Seuss, mmm looks good" and my daughter agreed. I started to have second thoughts though when my husband walked through and asked if it was from SpongeBob Squarepants. You can't please everyone I guess :)

I've decided to draw more of this type of image when I'm feeling tired of the normal work, to relax and have fun and perhaps I'll develop my own style in time.  I've also been toying with the idea of creating a little story using fingerprint characters. Miss 7 would love that too :)

Overcoming Mental Blocks

 Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success.  - John Keats

I've had an up and down sort of week this week. I've had lots of ideas for drawings and paintings but when it's come time to start them I've stalled. Each time I've lifted my pen a voice in my head has told me "that's a stupid idea for an image" or "you can't draw that it's too hard". I'd developed stage-fright since I discovered that some people are actually reading my blog, shock, horror, giggle.

Luckily I have a lot of very creative friends and I sent out a call for help dealing with mental blocks and guess what? Before anyone had even answered I was back drawing in my journal. I used the idea of a mental block as a way to kick start my creativity again and it worked! So after I'd worked that out of my system I went back to an idea I had earlier in the week, "what would make my home appliances perfect?" The image below is the result.

What a time saver this would be in the mornings, especially on school days! 

I'm not sure if my mental block will stay away but it's gone for now and I have a strategy for dealing with it if it happens again. Use the problem as a solution by creating an image about the problem and hopefully that will be enough to move through the block. :)

These two images were created using different colored pens and watercolor paints.

The child and the messy room

"Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk before it stops snowing" - Phyllis Diller

I don't know whether it's my daughter's age, she's seven, or just the way she naturally works, but my daughter's room always looks like a tornado passed through it. My son is now thirteen and I don't remember him being that messy at seven but who knows maybe my memory is going.

Anyway today we had the "you need to clean up your room or I'll go through it with a rubbish bag" talk. Miss seven whined a bit and said it was too hard to do on her own but I told her she was getting older now and that I trusted her judgement on what she wanted to keep and what should go out. So Miss seven went into her room and started to tidy up. I checked on her after five minutes and things did seem to be improving so I made the mistake of wandering off to do something else and promptly forgot all about the mess. After about an hour Miss seven proudly came through to tell me she had finished tidying and could she do something else now. Feeling very pleased with her maturity I followed her through to see what she had done.

Well, what can I say?

The room looked worse, if that's possible, than it had when she had started! Instead of going through all her artwork that was scattered all over the room and floor she had created new drawings and pulled out boxes of toys to hide them all behind and under. It was really hard not to laugh at her ingenuity.

Anyway she won and I helped her go through her artwork, storing the good pieces safely and binning the rest. We also went through the toys and sorted out some she had grown out of to donate. On the plus side we had lots of fun and even found three pairs of socks and some other clothes she thought she had lost.

This week I've been learning to draw human body parts. Realistic and cartoon hands and eyes. Hands are difficult and I need much more practice. I like the expressions you can get with just eyes though. Today's sketch is just eye expressions made with a black pen.