ALL BLOGS

While recovering a sense of integrity, as I was studying and working through the tasks of week 4 of the Artist’s Way, I felt that for this week’s artist date, I should clean my studio space, organise all my art supplies and especially all the new mixed media things I’m creating almost daily.

While learning something new is exciting, managing its storage is equally difficult.

So this Sunday I put my cleaning lady mode on, and organised all my collage papers, wrote all the prompts I’m loving working on, and all the new ideas I’m getting daily, categorised the collage papers based on colors and types. I had already bought some file folders for this organisation.

It was exhausting by the evening, but I also felt a bit of calm from all the chaos. I knew exactly where I can find something, and where should I keep my new creations. I labeled my scraps also and kept them organised. I never knew I’d love the scraps so much… especially after last week’s snippet rolls, they seem so precious now, lol.

While all the cleaning was going on, my artist craved for creating something new, may be something out of the scraps again… she really loves scraps 🙂

I had accumulated a lot of brown paper bags in the kitchen. I had thrown away hundreds of them in the past, but over the last 4 weeks, so many things changed. I felt I could create something out of them. And I got the idea ofcourse from all the mixed media artists you can find on youtube.

Here are the brown paper bags before they got worked on.

This week, as I was studying week 3 about recovering the sense of power, I had been going through burst of emotions on a daily basis, specially processing through all the emotions of shame resurfacing.

And I realised that one power the feeling of shame has on artists is not to let you do the things you wana do.

I observed that it has happened in my life a lot – the thing that is popularly known as procrastination.

Ever since I started writing the morning pages, which has only been 4 weeks by now, I’ve started noticing a change in me – I’m feeling more attracted towards mixed media. I’ve established myself as a landscape artist and have been teaching landscapes for the past 8 years, and I’m very good at it… yet I knew something is missing.

And over the past 4 weeks, I had started watching and doing some of the mixed media experiments.

One thing that particularly caught my attention was snippet rolls. I had been watching other artists create it like a zillion times on youtube, but felt paralised when it came to me creating them. So this week I decided not to step out, and rather try creating snippet rolls.

IMP: Once again Mr. resistance cropped up, and my mind started blabbering that I was too tired to do anything. It’s sunday afterall and I need to rest. I’ve been working hard all week, and sunday I shouldnt be doing anything.

I heard all of it and got to work!

First I created one with only scrap papers and old book pages as the base. It didn’t take long surprisingly, contrary to what my mind had been telling me.

During the week 2, as I was learning to pay attention to detail, I decided to take myself out to a local florist and buy my inner artist some flowers.

(But before anything, I must confess the huge amount of resistance I felt inside of me, to get me off the couch and drive to the florist shop. My mind told me a hundred reasons why it is a better idea to lay on the couch and spend a relaxing sunday afternoon! Yet I pushed myself out with all the strength I had. And I’m glad i did, because the later half of the day became a complete new adventure!)

Even if I’ve bought hundreds of flowers in the past, I realised I hadn’t ever paid much attention to them, like looking at the centre of the flowers, seeing their individual petals, or seeing the exact shade of color on them, how 2 colors mixes, how the petals wrap themselves around.

So with that in mind, I bought a bunch of flowers and created a bouquet in my flower vase.

I wanted to find out how my inner artist responds after seeing these intricate details.

Below are some images of my flowers.