Listening Past the Noise to Her Wild Self

This painting came with me to the undertow and rode the storm with me.​
It picked me up and carried me to shore. 

It wasn't an easy journey. This wasn't done in a day, or two, or three.
But weeks. Hours and hours spent with detail brushes.
Pushing the very boundaries of my abilities.
Challenging me. 
Cleaning me out. Pulled out all the wires and bits and what-makes-me-me until it reached my heart. 
And plucked it from my chest. 

My brains are scrambled, my feet unsteady;
when it put me back down, I stumbled along.
She was hard-won, fought for with blood, sweat, and tears.
The deepest painting experience I've ever had. ​

She is surrounded by Noise.
By the constant sensory input of chronic pain,
​over-stimulated and straining to BE, to think, to be CLEAR.
But she's going to Listen past it all. 

A week ago, I had a vision.
I was me, with feathers in my hair, with moccasins on my feet,
reconnected to my Native heritage,
surrounded by animals.
​It has been swimming in my head since then, 
all the peace I felt,
the Oneness,
the Truth of who I am underneath. 

That is what she is.
She is Me, under it all.
Past it all.
A Dream of Me.
Listening Past the Noise to Her Wild Self.​

I am ready to Listen, to Be, to Create. ​

​24"x24" mixed-media on wood

The Pictures Are Part of My Process

I spent my time, last night, after my summer solstice celebration, sketching. 

Even the next day, I can feel the energy from the circle tingling along my palms, leaking into everything I put my mind to. I type with new ease. I sketch easily and happily. I feel excited to create all day long, and instead of feeling stress, as I normally do at the end of the week, when I put together the package that will become Journaling Deep, I’m calm and centered. The video’s already filmed and the raw footage has been loaded onto my laptop. I can spend the afternoon editing in my favorite coffee shop instead of scrambling. 

You’d think after nearly 30 weeks of tutorials, I’d run out of ideas. And I did, for awhile, but am throwing myself at it with renewed vigor, material pouring out of me with the same excitement I remember from the first weeks of the project. 

Last night's sketch! Gotta fix those eyes!

That’s not what I sat down to write about, though! 

Back to my sketch. This morning (or afternoon, as I’ve been sleeping 12 hour nights to recover from my flare-up), I snapped a photo to share it on Instagram, as I usually do. And I thought, perhaps, I’d share with you why I do this with many, if not all of my sketches.

Because it helps make them better. 

An early version of my Sunshine piece. I went back and re-did the neck and shoulders.

I’ve found that, when you take a photo and look at it, you can find all the things you need to fix. For example, in my latest photo, I noticed that, despite my measuring and ruler-using, her eyes seem to be uneven in size and placement, so I should go back in and fix ‘em up before I start applying paint. 

But if I just look at the sketch, on the page, it doesn’t look like anything is wrong! 

I’ve used this practice with paintings, too! I take photos along the way, stepping back to see the whole thing from a distance — something you simply must do when working on a piece of art! Seeing things from a distance helps you switch from focusing on the details, on the close-up as you paint or sculpt or draw, to seeing the BIG PICTURE! 

What I'm currently working on. I haven't transfered her to the piece, yet, so the print-out is a placeholder.

Photos also let me see how I’m progressing, and creates a record for me to look back on when I feel the piece finished. They can also help you figure out where to place certain items — for me, I’m transferring my sketches to larger canvases, and I can place the print-out around the piece, snap a photo, and then look at all of them, side-by-side, feeling better equipped to make a decision on final placement. 

(I should sooo do a video on how I transfer my sketches to my pieces. Tomorrow, or Monday, for sure!)

So the next time you’re working on something, take the time to step back and snap a photo. Share it with us on Instagram, your blog, Facebook, or even the Studio! You might just get some helpful feedback that’ll snap you back into the flow!

I’ll be sending out a newsletter tomorrow, with announcements, a Studio cheat-sheet, & little tutorial just for subscribers! Not on the list? Sign up in the sidebar to the right, where it says, “Sign up for sparkles in your inbox!”  

The Visual Story of My Life

Wow, it’s been five days since we last spoke? 

Sorry about that, sweetie. 

I’ve been playing with my new camera (the footage is beautiful; we’re learning the basics of shading in Journaling Deep this summer, and moving on to lettering and portraits!), working on postcard mail-art to send to those who have sent me lovelies in the mail, and celebrated a friend’s birthday this weekend (overnight! In a big house!). 

There’s also a lot simmering under the surface, a lot happening behind the scenes, that I’m not ready to share with you, yet. Things like an e-book full of techniques and projects, a new smaller class, an art journaling class for the chronically ill, less-mobile, tired, or on a budget, live chat sessions, and more! I’ve been thinking of creating a circle, a women’s circle, that meets regularly online (Google Hangouts are amazing!). 

When I launched my Mentorship program in March, I even made a slot for the possibility of a circle, but feel the original idea and copy was flawed, and am revising it. Right now. As I type this. If you want to uplevel your journaling, get in the meat of your life, and transform your thinking, drop me a line. I’ll be lowering the price, widening the net, and asking you to be a guinea pig. Journaling changed my life, as you may know; seven years ago, my FMS and depression had gotten so bad, I was suicidal and jumping out of cars with tears streaming down my face. It has changed my life so completely, and for the better, that I don’t want it to take you years and years…perhaps a few months, even!

This isn’t what this blog post was going to be about, but if you write Morning Pages or keep a written journal, you know how epiphanies can just happen like magic when you let the thoughts out of your head in the form of writing! 

As the years have passed, my journal has progressively gotten larger, going from a large Moleskine to the 9”x12” Visual Journal I use now. And my paintings are now on 2’x2’ wood, and those are the small ones! It seems as though my work is getting larger and larger….or maybe there’s just more and more I want to include in the visual story of my life. 

But a month ago or so, I was sent a 5”x7” Visual Journal by Strathmore (oh, speaking of them, massive giveaway happening really soon!) and decided to toss it in my purse for easier on-the-go journaling. It fits perfectly, along with a pencil case filled with all my sketching & zentangle supplies, and I’ve found myself pulling it out more and more while watching TV, waiting in doctors’ offices, or even, yes, at the party this weekend (I was the only one out there the next morning in PJs and a sketchbook in hand!). I’ve found myself drawing more girls and portraits, working off reference photos, and keeping my own little dictionary of Things Samie Really Likes Today. 

It’s not as bright and colorful as my regular art journal, or have as many “finished” pages. I like to think of this as my brain on paper. Raw, unfinished, and all over the place. But I’m beginning to get the hang of it, and feel like I’m unlearning all the stuff I told myself I had to do to make a “good” journal. 

(If you'd like to view all these in a gallery, click here!)

Journal Page Mathematics

I wanted to show you how the journal page from yesterday’s post (which, if you haven’t read it yet, go give it a gander!) came to be. 

My pages evolve organically, with layers added in bits and pieces here and there until, finally, they come together. They’re not in order as you turn the page; rather, they are scattered and added to and get messy and come to be as they’re supposed to. 

I may not have a particular thought in mind until the final push — a collection of layers, created from the cast-offs of other pages and projects being worked on, will, suddenly, call to me the same way you see a face in the grain of a wooden door, a dog in a puffy white cloud, or Mary in the center of a tomato. In the slant of sunlight or the shadows of a lamp, it all magically becomes clear in a way I’m sure the Divine always saw, but I needed time to see. 

Which is a very positive and together-sounding way to explain my process. My students have been asking me why I make the decisions I do while doing art, and I had to come up with something.

Allow me to walk you through the evolution of a journal page. 

I used this page to test a doodle foam stamp I made for Journaling Deep. It worked alright (this is before I discovered GAC 100 and its magic properties for making brayered stamps work better).

Not pictured: I decided to see if my soft pastels would work the same way my charcoal does, ie. using erasers as drawing tools (I have several erasers, now, and blending stumps). It didn’t. So I covered the page with bright, dreamy colors and then let it get all funky because my fixiatif was in my car. 

I then decided I couldn’t really do anything with a page covered by pastels and painted over them with gesso. This is when I started to get an idea of what I wanted to write/journal about — I’d been listening to Sara Bareilles in the car and there was a lyric I wanted to do a page around. This is about the same time my Leg Pain became my Leg and Arm Pain and I stopped being able to sleep (still unresolved). 

I knew I wanted a representation of myself, and didn’t want it to be an illustration, per se, but a drawing with a nose. So I hopped over to Tam’s Fabulous Faces course and watched the first video — it is an amazing class, by the way! I wholeheartedly recommend it. What’s even more amazing is even though I followed along, my work looks different than what she drew. That’s the mark of a great teacher! 

 

I painted the face with acrylics and watercolor crayons, leaving the rest of it white. 

 

I remembered a page I’d done recently that transformed a bleh page into one I loved, so I borrowed the ink writing and Cobalt Teal, as well as the lines of dots I’d done on there. 

This is am important step to cultivating your own mark — instead of sitting down to find inspiration online or in a magazine, look back through your journal for bits and pieces you can transplant and refine on a later page (I’ll be offering a short course on pushing through your creative roadblocks next week if you want to learn more about this whole process!). 

 

By the time the page was finished, the message had changed from one of anger to one of positivity and hope. And that, my darlings, is the transformative power of visual journaling. 

 

If you’re not on my mailing list, I’d suggest hopping on; as I go through this transition into creating a more aligned business and life, I’ll be posting to the mailing list more often and offering beta-test opportunities for my new offerings.