Dripping Faces

Of course I could not stop at just doing the couple of dripping faces I did yesterday....



(And as the title suggests, there are more videos to come in the next couple of days!)

An artful mess

The other day I was watching something on TV where a girl casually mentioned that she makes paintings using a mixture of glue and paint and she paints with chopsticks*.
While I realise that this might be something people have done in school, I had never tried it. So what better place to try out this messy technique than in my Art Journal?

First I mixed my acrylic paint with PVA glue. I added a bit of water to make it a bit more runny, then adding a bit more glue until I got the consistancy I thought would work.

And then it was just a case of getting messy!



These are the first two I did, in my Art Journal:



Because I had too much paint&glue mix left, I also did one on a folder I use to scrape on my left over paint:
('Did you notice that folder before? No? Well, now she put a bird on it!')
and did some quick watercrayon backgrounds on some paper and did two more on them:


Oh how I love making an artful mess in my journal!

*)The documentary was on Channel4 'Amish: the world's squarest teenagers' and the girl is Lizzy Watson, and she takes this technique to a whole other level! It took me a while to find her but here's her website.

Urban Sketching from home (2)

I did some more sketches of pictures I took a while ago:







Note to self: take more pictures of buildings!

Inspired by Leslie

So the last couple of days I've been ill, and those who know me will know that I don't do ill. At least not as in, being-sick-ill. And I was being-sick-ill. And then I was panicking about being-more-sick-ill and it all just got horrible and awful and I haven't eaten for two days and I stayed in bed putting my pillows so I'd be half-sitting just in case... well..

As you can imagine the last couple of days have not been much fun.

So today was the first time I got the laptop out again (I had been on Twitter and Facebook but on my phone which isn't half as much fun but it was a great distraction - thank you my Tweeter/FBer friends!) and I was catching up on some Youtube videos and saw Leslie Herger's 'automatic drawing' videos. (here and here and she's done a bunch more)

Even though I'm still not 100% there yet and my tumtum is still playing up a bit, I got one of my sketchpads out and some cheapy markers and did this one:
(the colours are nowhere near as bright in real life but it's the best I can do at the moment)

It felt good to be drawing again, rather than slipping into another 'will I be able to reach the sick bucket in time'-panic (I am an emetophobic, so even though I'm joking about it here it really does set off a bad panic attack, just as panic attacks can set off the fear of having to be sick...) I calmed down and focused on just filling in the colours.

I'll be sticking this in my Art Journal as a reminder of how art can prevent me from going overboard in my head. Just breathe and fill in the colours...

Edit:
This is the page I ended up doing:

Say my name (right)

I've been meaning to do this video for a while now, but never got round to it, so tonight I decided to take some time out and actually do it.. It's possibly the shortest video I've ever done, but would you believe it, I had to do a billion takes because I was stumbling over my words and then it took me forever for Youtube to not make me sound like a robot on acid...

But here it is...

I quit Nanowrimo

Yeah. I know.

See, my heart wasn't in it this year. I couldn't put my finger on why. I had done hardly any planning, knew it was going to be a ghost story (a little bit more than that, but I'm not completely dropping the story, might end up finishing it one day so I'm not telling...), had two character names and that was it.

This would have been my 8th Nanowrimo. I did two in Holland and this would have been my 6th one in England. My first couple of Nanowrimo's were about whether or not I could actually write 50 000 words in a month. Turned out that yes, I could do that. Quite easily, in fact.

Then came the challenge of actually finishing the story itself, writing 50 000 words and actually come up with a beginning, middle bit and an ending. That was a bit more difficult, but I did that too. The last three Nanowrimo's were coomplete stories and I was ever so proud.

So this year, I didn't feel the challenge. I wrote 5004 words yesterday and I didn't enjoy it. It felt like a chore. I was thinking of all the things I couldn't do this month because the writing does take up a lot of free time. I was doing it because I've done it for so many years now.


So I quit. I feel bad about it, but at least I quit now and not forced myself to keep on writing for another week, hating it more and more each day.

And hey, this gives me more time for art! Yayyy! Be prepared for more 'Urban Sketching from home' posts. Ohyeah!!