living life one art project at a time
It looks like I’m in a fruit state of mind this week—after I drew the orange a couple days ago, then came this:
“Uva,” 5 x 5 inches, pen and ink, prints available in my shop
“Uva” is the Italian word for grapes. I think it’s a beautiful, open, simple little word, and the repeating circles fit right into my natural patterns alphabet. I’ve got some tough letters coming up—w, x, y, but u was a good one to get done! Does anyone have some creative ideas for those letters? I could use the help!
A couple of days ago, along with my big announcement that I had given notice at my day job to start doing art full time, I mentioned a coming scheme/celebration. Well, here it is—I’m having a Quit Your Day Job Button Celebration!
How it works: I will be making 100 completely original, one of a kind, hand-drawn buttons between now and September 15, my quitting day. Yes, every single button will be completely original and hand-drawn (and buttoned) by me! This means that each 2.25 inch button is a completely original piece of art! I have just posted the first batch here, and I started a flickr set here so you can see all of the buttons together as I go along.
This is a really fun project because I get to explore the depths of my creative brain in trying to come up with 100 button-worthy illustrations over the next 7 weeks. It also gives art-lovers a chance to get a completely original (and wearable) piece of artwork for $5.
Here are some pictures:
Each button comes displayed on a piece of textured pastel cardstock, so if you’re not a button wearer, you could frame them and hang them on the wall.
Each button is titled and signed on the back.
And here is the first batch—16 buttons in all:
There is one more part to this celebration, and I’m calling it:
Yes, I mean YOU! Got any great ideas for a button, or would you like to see something special on a button of your very own? Well, leave your ideas in a comment on this post, and you could see your idea come to fruition! I will be picking a selection of reader’s choice ideas and making them into buttons. If I do make your button, I will contact you via email and give you the option to buy the button (with free shipping) before it’s released to the public. You are under absolutely no obligation to buy, so suggest away! Depending on the number of suggestions, I will create a few batches of reader’s choice buttons during the next 7 weeks.
I hope these buttons give you a few giggles and laughs and bits of inspiration.
Oh, and please don’t keep this a secret, spread the word! You’re welcome to use the drawing at the top of my sidebar at right to tell people about it!
Oranges are one of my favorite fruits: they taste like sunshine, they’re durable and transportable, and here in California they’re cheap and have a long season—what’s not to like? During the winter, we get ours in 10 lb bags from our favorite fruit-grower at the farmer’s market. Every week we haul one of those bags home and enjoy every last citrus-y drop. I’m surprised I didn’t think of this one earlier, but the letter “o” was stumping me for my natural patterns alphabet until yesterday.
Looking at pictures of oranges (sadly, it isn’t orange season anymore—so I didn’t have a real live model), I noticed another one of my favorite things inside: triangles. I must have noticed this before, but the inside of an orange is a circle of triangles! How beautiful! So, I drew this very simple interpretation.
“Orange,” 5 x 5 inches, pen and ink, prints available in my shop
I have some big news. Perhaps as big as news from me can get, especially in reference to this blog. I gave notice at my office job this week, and I will start my life as a full-time artist this coming October!
For those of you who have been following this blog, you might know that this Fall was already going to be a pretty life-changing time for me—I’m getting married at the end of September. But I’ve been thinking, and dreaming, and hoping to start doing art full time for quite a while, and I have finally taken the plunge.
This is very special news for me, and I really have been excited to share this with all of you blog readers specifically, because starting this blog was one of my first big steps towards this goal, although I didn’t completely know it at the time. I started this blog, and then you all just showed up, and things started happening inside of me and outside of me that just kept making this transition seem more and more important, and real, and possible.
I have started and quit a lot of jobs, but this situation is completely different—this is the first time that I’ve known there is something I love and am passionate about waiting on the other side. While this transition is scary, and somewhat like jumping off a cliff, the idea of being a full-time artist is so mind-blowingly expansive and inspiring that it trumps all talk of fear and risk.
This is a major time of new beginning for me, so I’m putting things into high gear to try and open up more possibilities and figure out the answer to that big question that everyone is asking—how will I make my income? No, I am not independently wealthy, and to be honest, I have been living on a “starving artist” level income for some time now, so I may be doing things somewhat backwards, but hey, didn’t someone say life is an adventure?
This whole thing is a combination of blind faith and elbow grease. What I do know is that over the past several months I have started to see income potential in my work, so I am starting from somewhere, and I think that a creative mind (which I’m assuming I have) is the best place to start on this very creative life project!
I have been doing a lot of scheming, and you will be seeing one such scheme later this week on the blog—a celebration of sorts. The picture above is a little hint.
As always, thanks so much for reading and being a part of my creative little world, hopefully about to get much bigger!
I hope you will come on this adventure with me!
There are many obvious reasons to be inspired by nature: nature is the original creator, the origin of all things, the most effortless and gigantic inventor. Nature never tries to make anything—it just does—it’s inherent in nature’s definition, and its creations are simply beautiful at their base. You might call this effortless artistry. It is the design at the foundation of the universe, the planet, and every living thing.
But if I ask myself why nature continues to inspire me, day in and day out, it’s something more subtle, or perhaps more mundane—it’s that nature reminds me to pay attention and notice things.
No matter how busy you are, it’s hard to ignore the wind. No matter how frantic you are, it’s hard to ignore the rain, even if it makes you more frantic. No matter how depressed you are, it’s difficult to ignore that little spot of sunlight that’s beating down on you through a split in the trees, or the squirrel that keeps circling you on your lunch break.
Maybe we often don’t let the miracle in, but if we’re lucky, we let ourselves stop and listen to the leaves making their paper song in the wind, and in that moment, we can know that there is something happening that is so much bigger than our deadlines and dentist appointments. There’s something gigantic that is so beyond our days or our lives, or even our planet.
When I realize this, even subconsciously, I get to stop and smile to myself, and be thankful that I got to come to this moment, this place, and hear the leaves shaking in the breeze. Be thankful that I got to be a part of this giant dance—even if I am one small ant going about my day.
Sometimes I find it refreshing to not be able to control something, and nature is one of those things that will not and cannot be controlled. Even when we think we’re controlling it, there can be surprising effects, as we’re coming to find out with global warming. It’s good to be reminded of our own insignificance sometimes—it takes the pressure off our daily feats and reminds us to sit back and try to appreciate what we’re so humbled to get to experience in this one life.
I could now launch into all the ways that our neglect and un-appreciation of nature have led us to start abusing things and create problems in a beautiful system. How as individual little ants, we are insignificant, but as an un-caring swarm we have had a damaging effect, but we all know this from listening to the news.
In the end, I’m thankful that nature has made it possible for me to walk through this life and look at all of the wonders and curiosities, including my own body and the brain and fingers that are writing this, and I hope you’re able to experience this too. With issues like global warming looming, it’s hard to know what to do or how to help. I think appreciation and inspiration are good places to start.
A while ago, I stumbled upon One in 8 Million a weekly series created by the New York Times about New Yorkers. Each week a collection of photographs and audio track tell the story of one person—one quirky New York character.
It’s so interesting to hear the people tell their stories, and the photographs are the perfect poignant accompaniment to these short “films.” It’s especially interesting to me when people use new technology like the internet and computer editing programs, but are still able to create an old-world feel. In a culture where we’re used to seeing hundreds of images per minute, seeing these stills really slows the pace down, and makes you think more about what’s happening in the picture.
The films are so short (around two minutes), but they’re really able to tell you a lot about the person. They’re intimate and beautiful, and they really show each personality, reminding me how each person has something unique to give.
In a completely different genre and style, yesterday I found this cool website full of people talking about their “aha moments.”
These are not artsy like One in 8 Million, but there’s something inspiring about seeing people talk about moments that have changed their lives. I am just now beginning to understand that what drew me to both of these is that there’s so much honesty and truth in them—and I think honesty and truth are always worth listening to.
I’m officially at the half-way point with my Natural Patterns Alphabet as of this flower:
“Zinnia,” 5 x 5 inches, pen and ink, prints available in my shop
I’m afraid my friend Era is going to think I am stalking her brain again with this one, as it seems like another name for this series could be “Era’s favorite things.” What can I say—great minds think alike? Really, I think we’re both just in love with natural things—who isn’t?
While I was drawing this one, I just happened to have a couple of other drawings out (I try to look at other drawings when I draw new ones in an attempt to get the letters to be a consistent size), and they went together so marvelously that I had to take a picture:
As I mentioned a while back, several different sub-sets are developing as I go along, including this “blossoming-themed” set. I will have to start photographing the others—there could be fruits, vegetables, woodland items, sea life. Yoohoo! I love sets!
Actually, I was making up some groupings of artwork to submit to local stores, and I realized some nice sets in my abstract work, so I made them into flickr sets—bold abstractions and fine line abstractions. It’s fun to look back at old work and see how they evolved and hang together now, and how the different pieces play off each other.
I seem to be in a self-critical mood these last couple of days, and I realize that I most often post about the glory of art, but rarely (somewhat deliberately) leave out the pesky challenges.
I have to say, three times was a charm with this drawing—I just couldn’t get it right, and wasn’t really even sure I did when I finished this version, although it’s growing on me. I just wanted to share this because maybe there’s someone out there who looks at all of my nice little posts about art, and doesn’t realize that sometimes I’m cursing at my pen after I flub up a line, or I smear something on the page, or I just have to face the realization that I did not do what I wanted to do, and I have to do it again.
Two great lessons of art are: learn how to forgive yourself, and realize that you are not your art. It’s easy to get critical of yourself when your art isn’t turning out, but the truth is: art is a process, and you learn by doing. Also a failed piece of art doesn’t mean you’re a failure, and you most definitely learned something in the process (which means the experience was a success, as are you for continuing on).
Sometimes I have to teach and re-teach myself these ideas and just know when to walk away. Last night was one of those times—I drew this raspberry drawing twice and couldn’t get it right—it bothered me a lot, but it was bed time. I came back to it this afternoon, and I’m much happier with my results today. So, all I’m saying is, hang in there, chin up, and try it again tomorrow.
5 x 5 inches, pen and ink, prints available in my shop
What a relief it was to pop down to San Francisco yesterday and enjoy the 70 degrees and sunny weather. I know, I’m always complaining about the heat here, but can you blame me? It’s been up around 100 degrees for many days now! Uggh. But yesterday, I got to go down to San Francisco and do many wonderful things as well as appreciate the fine coastal weather!
Stop number one was the San Francisco Renegade Craft Fair at the Fort Mason Center.
The show was in a cavernous building right on the pier, with so many gorgeous crafts, I forgot to take pictures as I oohed and ahhed. It was kind of like Etsy in the flesh! Check out their website to see if there’s a location near you—it’s definitely worth a visit.
I bought this gorgeous little letterpress card from Sycamore Street Press—I wish you could see it in person because, since it’s letterpressed, not only can you see the design, but you can feel it on the paper!
After Renegade, we went over to North Beach (San Francisco’s Little Italy) and had pizza at a great pizzaby the slice place that I’ve been to several times, called Golden Boy Pizza:
They have mean, giant slices that you can eat at a bar—it’s a great hole-in-the-wall place on Green Street, just off of Columbus. They aren’t messing around here—they do pizza, and they do it well!
The whole purpose of this trip was to visit with some old college friends I haven’t seen in a while, so once we were all assembled, we went on a jaunt up Telegraph Hill. Here we are at the top:
You might be able to guess which one I am, as I’m the only girl. And another beautiful view of the bay:
What a wonderful day! Here’s to old friends, arts & crafts, pizza, and cool coastal weather!
The first thing I ever wanted to be was an artist. I can’t remember ever really wanting to be anything else (although I had a lapse for most of college during which I thought it was unrealistic), so no conversation about things that inspire me would be complete without art making.
There’s something about taking an idea, an ethereal notion, and making it into something tangible. Whether it’s a pair of mittens, a dinner, or a drawing, it’s an inherently inspiring process to bring something into existence that has never been made precisely the same way.
For me, it’s images—I don’t quite know what it is that gets me about them exactly—I’ve said it before, but just the white paper drives me wild—it’s an expansive space that asks me to open up.
When you think about it, art and making are infinite. There are an endless number of options—some people might think there’s nothing new to make, but the new-ness comes from you—each person is new, and honestly, even if you tried to copy someone else, there would always be some detail that only you could create.
Making is the ultimate venue for being yourself—for displaying your unique personality. Work in an office, and you will have to do things according to common policy. Solve equations and your goal is to get the same answer as everyone else. Play sports, and you have to abide by a pre-made set of rules. But make art, and you can do anything. It’s like letting your heart fly up and away into a land that you’re making as you go along—kind of like Herald and the Purple Crayon.
Art is humbling and powerful at the same time. Sometimes making art can feel like being visited—I say my prayers to the sky every time I get a new idea for a drawing, forgetting where I end and the universe begins, and being thankful for that. At the same time, putting pen to paper is powerful—bringing something to life says what’s in my head is worth creating—I have ideas that are worth sharing.
So many people say that they’re not creative. Excuse me for saying this so bluntly, but that’s just plain wrong. It’s just not true. It’s some lie someone told you, or that you told yourself, thinking it would keep you safe—thinking if you claimed you were not creative, you would never have to make something completely your own.
Now, not all people love art, or drawing, or crafting, but we all put our creative stamp on things. I think creativity comes up in the smallest ways in our lives. My future mother-in-law may not do a craft, but she does an amazing job planning parties and dinner menus, my sister may not paint, but you should see how she talks to children, my future sister-in-law may not draw, but she just planned a beautiful wedding.
Creativity often comes up in ways we don’t even recognize, in things we do naturally—like picking our clothes in the morning or arranging our homes. I think if most people thought about it, they would realize that some of the things they love to do best are full of creating—people feel freedom in these things because they’re making something new.
This world would be a happier place if we all allowed ourselves to fly up and away more often—to run with crayons—or rearrange the living room. I’ve said it so many times, and I’ll say it again—open up, go forth, and make!
