Mixed Media

The last few prompts were to write down the emotions on these art journal pages which felt something I have never felt before. I usually write my heart out in the morning pages, this was the first time I wrote my emotions in my art. And with a few extra touch ups, the pages were finally done. Here are some images of the final pages.

I think this week’s artist date was so in-line with what I learnt through this week – it helped me get over the nasty grip of perfectionism, and made me take a huge risk I had been avoiding for quite sometime. – Use my creativity to put some random scraps together along with some paints and doodles and creating something beautiful and meaningful – and recovering a sense of connection between the collage pieces and also between the artist within me and my emotions.

Truly instead of thinking UP the collage in my mind which I’ve been doing for the past 2 months, getting it DOWN in action on these pages.

I think my most favorite artist date so far!

This week something miraculous happened. The whole week have been reading about recovering the sense of possibility and it almost opened my mind’s eye to see the amount of possibilities out there in terms of art and how much I had kept my mind closed over the years, thinking and looking into same kind of paintings.

The miraculous thing that happened is – I had been struggling to decide something particular for this week’s artist date, and finally I decided I’ll doodle some butterflies and create stickers out of them (which I eventually did later) – this was the plan in my mind. But before I could start doing it, my inner artist wanted run away from the studio, take out white paint and mix baking powder and apply it on some old boring boxes in the kitchen (which she had seen this morning in Pinterest and had liked the idea).

I allowed her to do so, and told myself after she is done with one object, we will get back to the butterfly making project. But one thing turned into 2, into 5, and ultimately into 10 objects that day. I played like a child converting everything I could find and convert them into faux ceramics objects, as you can see by now.

It was probably the best artist date ever – in terms to how I felt. The joy of seeing something old and boring turn into something magnificent was simply an experience I’d wana have again and again.

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.