Make Bad Art……Make Good Art….Just keep drawing, keep putting pen to paper, playing with your paint, or cutting or pasting or sewing and designing. Just stick with it, thru the empty times, the unproductive pieces, the what am i going to do with this mess work. Keep searching, when you feel like all of your art is going nowhere, just keep plugging along. Cuz you never know when INSPIRATON will strike. How it will strike or what is brewing inside your so called “empty head”.
You just never know, but I believe we must attend to our “art”. We must treat it like we would other lessons we take to improve. You know like piano lessons, swim, tennis lessons. Or even Spanish lessons, we must be diligent, dontchathink? Why do we expect art to be so different? Is it because of all the gifted artists out there? The ones that produce beautiful piece after beautiful piece and don’t ever seem to go stale. But we don’t ever see their practice pages do we? Maybe we should! I think DaVinci has a whole book published just from his notebooks. He practiced and wasn’t he gifted??
The other day, I was wondering why I seem to want to color so much when I can’t even make an original drawing for the life of me. I haven’t taken a drawing class yet, or watercolor or painting class. I really, really want to, but just haven’t found the right one. But no worries, it’ll come when I’m ready!
While feeling so bored and uninspired with myself I stumbled upon a blog that took me over to YouTube. Before I knew it I was watching papparoc46 on YouTube about drawing Keltic Knots…..I was mesmerized and with the visual aid and thankfully the pause button, I could actually figure this out! You’ve got to check out this vlog, it’s so good. I then checked out her vlog about the 10 things she likes about herself (titled My Ten Things). She is hilarious, I couldn’t stop laughing. She’s got a very dry sense of humor that is just charming!
PRACTICE PAGE 1:
I liked only a couple of things on the page; I liked the word “ART” , and the flowers, the square tiles, but I am pretty lousy at swirls, and i have a hard time making anything with pink look good! But pink and blue go together right????
PRACTICE PAGE 2:
I was inspired by this piece on flickr, but my piece just didn’t do it for me. Possibly it was the pink again???? But pink and green go together right??
PRACTICE PAGE 3:
This was a fun page, but it didn’t have any direction to it, it was like a practice piece, like a warm up page for something to happen in my head later, hopefully, maybe, please!!!!
AH-HA moment Page:
For me, I finally got to a piece I like! I made a piece that let me play with my markers, play with my colors and learn something at the same time. I love this piece. Yeah, I know it’s simple, and I know that it has mistakes, but it represents a turning point. That when I get so bored with my drawing, so bored with my color choices that I must just keep observing, keep reading and eventually I’ll hit upon something that excites me. That gives me that “I can’t wait to try this myself” feeling! Oh yeah!
Thanks for stopping by! And letting me tell you my tale of woe this week! And if you can relate to this at all, just keep on doing your thing out there, you just may stumble upon something you like too!
Eden
8 comments:
Wow! Thanks so much for this inspiring post. I have not been doing any art recently. Partly because of the holidays but also because I've been sick....but that's no excuse! I was on a roll doing art every day and then I quit and now it feels like I don't know where to start. But thanks to you I know what to do....just pick up a pencil and begin making marks. That's all it takes!! Thank you sooooo much, Eden!!!
i am wowwed by your pages here. such amazing work just in terms of time invested. i like your swirls. do you have a color wheel? sometimes when i get stuck about color choices, im glad i have one (made by me in a design class i took a few years ago. one of the best things to come out of that class) another good resource for color combos is http://colorlovours.com
pink and orange look good together, too. i find red and its family to be trying sometimes. its a very demanding color.
i look forward to seeing your designs when you post them on flickr. it gives me a nudge to come see what you are doing. im really glad we found each other.
keep on keeping on. we need to make some JUST MAKE ART buttons! :)
~sue
Thanks for the comments!! Yes, we should definitely make some buttons with JUST MAKE ART statements! That would be so fun! I have found that there are just some colors that i play with better than others, I really have a hard time with pink, but not so much with red! I prefer blue over purple and love Yellow! It's like some colors i just don't know what to with them, how to make them shine. Maybe that's it, some colors are just suppose to be supporting colors, background colors not the stars! Imagine that :)
Oh man, this post goes straight to my core!!! I have been struggling BIG time with my so-called "art" lately. I forced myself to do a painting for my mom for Christmas, and that was about it. I don't ever feel like doing ANYTHING. You are right, I think you do have to keep at it. Its hard when that stupid negative voice tells you that you'd be better off laying in bed, because you suck anyway! Thanks for this post. I might copy pieces of it and read as my little affirmation when I am feeling particularly down.
Oh, I LOVE that pink and green page. I think its beautiful ;)
Hi! I love your doodles. and thanks for posting that video from popparoc46 -- incidentally in your blog you've got the a's and o's reversed so it took me a while to find her on YouTube.. I wanted to hear about her 10 things. I have another color selection tool that you might find interesting it is kuler.adobe.com, I use this to help my clients make web design color choices for their websites.
Happy New Year!
Thanks for the spellcheck Whitney....I'll fix it now! Just so you know, if you click inside the embedded you tube, it will pull you to youtube and you won't need to search.
Thanks for all the nice comments.
That page looks so lovely and magical and creative!
Your blog is very very inspiring ... I love it!
Yasmina
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