Abstract art and the subconscious

For the first time in months I have done art.

Yesterday, late afternoon to early evening I spent time doing art and I did it in a rebellious kind of way.

So tired of never having access to my art table I did a very childish thing and sat crossed-leg on my bed and risked ink stains on the bed covers to do it.

I did get a green splodge on my duvet, which looks black against the red polka dots that were originally on it.

But it wasn’t as messy as I thought it would be.  Paul moaned, of course he did – ink splodge on the bed covers, but he didn’t say as much as he usually does because he knows in a way, it was his fault this happened.  My art table has been taken over by the whole household, except me.

I made abstract conceptual art of a beauty boutique with inks, coloured pencils, biro and sharpies. 

I also made a lady and cut her out as part of a big collage I intend to do as part of a free course I signed up a week ago to – thing is, I haven’t done the project yet, because I couldn’t find a wooden palette big enough to continue.  I have everything else though – but the palette is meant to be the canvas!

I also learned today when experimenting with different music on Alexa that I’ve been a big fan of The Kinks my whole life and never knew.  Every song of theirs I was like… ooh this is my most favourite song of all time, I was like that with around ten of their songs I listened to.  But I’ve told you all before, I have the memory of a sieve.

I probably knew once, that I liked them.

As stupid as it sounds I thought quite a lot of their songs were from The Beatles, The Beach Boys or The Monkees to be honest.

So yeah, I learned I like The Kinks, typical really upon reflection.

A new short story series has entered my mind today, which I was also practising art for.  I wanted to make the art of a Goth girl, as the main character is Goth – I want to write three short stories before I do my plan.  The plan is, to post them here on my blog as a weekly thing. 

I probably won’t, but who knows.

It’s a black comedy comic strip.

Still intend to write the other projects, but my heart isn’t in something since I found out someone wanted to steal it, I am tired of idea thieves.  It really is disheartening.

So, that’s what I am up to lately.

To me, that’s huge progress.

I’ve been in a huge depression slump since September; this is my first creative foray since then.  Well on a major scale that lasted longer than thirty minutes in any case and wasn’t poetry either!

I’ve been eager to get heavily into art actually; particularly conceptual abstract in mixed media format and collages.

I’ve been trying to learn off and on for about a year now, what abstract art actually means – to try and develop respect for it, because to be honest with you, up until recently I had a very naïve and uneducated idea about abstract.

You know… anyone and their dog can do it.  Ouch.

Actually there is a lot of thought and feeling that goes into abstract work, a lot more than you realise.

You realise that in the first few minutes of abstract the artist genuinely doesn’t know what they are doing, they are just adding colour and shapes to the canvas to fill it up – then they layer it and cover up a lot of what they’ve done in order to make something special to them.

You see the thing is, abstract really is suggestive.  The artist sees something that you and I won’t, then give it a name based on what they see.

I remember an art class I did once in the last school I’ve ever been to – where I was at the frustrated sweaty end of a ranting art teacher, because he felt I was disrespecting the craft because I couldn’t grasp what abstract or even surrealism was at the time.  He wanted an abstract painting or sculpture of a musical instrument and I couldn’t do it for the life of me.

He forced me to read loads of books for that whole lesson and I realised what I was doing wrong.  I was attempting realism, because I thought that’s what he wanted from me.

I thought abstract at the time meant bold unusual colours with blocky patterns in it. 

When I finally grasped what he wanted, he was so happy he was bouncing off the walls for weeks and from being the most hated pupil he ever had, I became his biggest success in his words!

I realised what he wanted me to do was to create a musical instrument of my choice, but make sure it doesn’t look normal – that it looks contorted, sort of trapped between realities and maybe make it in a way in which if you squint and put your head in a certain position it will actually look like the guitar you meant for it to be.  Weird, but then again – it’s all thinking outside of the box.  We can all look at a picture, but do we really see it?

How deeply do we look at it, do we see details?  Do we try to see beyond splodges and shapes or do we take it for granted?

That’s the thing with abstract, a lot of people do take it for granted and pooh, pooh it.

The best way I’ve found in understanding abstract art, is to get used to looking at shapes in many forms.  Silhouettes are a good start.  Splodges on paper, but don’t just look at the splodges – look at them as silhouettes, what could they be the silhouettes of?

If you squint your eyes or tilt your head slightly or a lot does the silhouette look different?

That’s the understanding behind abstract art I’ve found.

Sometimes, yes, it’s just random stuff people throw on a canvas, but a large amount of abstract artists really do over think how they make things appear.

Another way in learning about abstract art that helped me was the idea of junk journaling and collage.  You take scrapbooking papers and you cut them into shapes and you paste them onto a paper, you have a square and a triangle, put them together and it is a house, but they are random colour and patterns the shapes – all of this helped me understand better.

So abstract is both the worlds of random paint throwing and thinking deeply about what you’re doing – this is something I’ve learned from almost every abstract artist.

They really do start off, just piling paint onto a canvas for ages until they squint in a certain way or tilt their head or just simply see beyond what they are doing – this is why they pause and focus on the picture regularly – they are trying to see what their subconscious has just made and it does give people a huge insight to the state of the artists mind.

It’s all subconscious, it’s not meant to be 3D realism. 

Today, I was concentrating on my abstract picture, without a hope in Hell knowing what I was doing, I just went back to being five years old and threw different shapes and colours and textures onto my canvas until I saw what looked to me to be a mess of clothes, boots and shoes all over a carnival style boutique, I outlined some things and I did some random scratches and texts and to me it works.

I didn’t intend to make it some flamboyant carnival style clothing boutique, I just wanted to paint and play.

But it is funny how my subconscious did that, because I haven’t had a shopping trip for six years, not where I can impulse buy more than £10 and in the past few days I’ve really missed my old haunts in London and the ability to go out for a shopping spree of £300 without battering an eye lid like I used to!

So by throwing myself into abstract art, I’ve found I am learning a lot about myself and my deep desires.

I really do miss London and I did notice along the flanks of the painting, it looked like some foggy scenes of a London high-street!

I missed doing art and todays lifted my spirits slightly.

Thanks for reading!

Art and Octopuses

I don’t know why on the 3^rd March 2023 around two to three in the morning I became transfixed with writing poetry and flash fiction based on octopuses, but I do know one thing…

I am really good at painting octopuses!

I don’t really know why I wanted to share this; I am writing this after writing the flash fiction story called “A boy’s unconscious battle”. 

I feel like painting the scene in my mind right now, but we all know why that can’t happen right now.  No available art table and I am not too keen to go downstairs within ten feet of a rat to paint at near four in the morning when its freezing cold downstairs and Ray (my house rabbit) will have a temper tantrum throughout the whole painting session because I am disturbing him at an unholy hour and please turn out the light you selfish human!

Rightly so too!

If I could have painted I know what the scene would look like.

My son Henry twisted in his blankets like how I saw him tonight, surrounded by his sea of teddy bears fallen around him in what looked like their attempt to try and free him from the onslaught of sheet tentacles around his hips and arms, Henry’s legs and arms all over the place too – he didn’t look very comfortable.  A pillow on the floor and chewing in his sleep – he was talking about different flavours of gum moments before he slept.

It would have been fun to have painted it, at least six hours as it would be a complicated piece for me, a mix of ink and watercolours.

Thanks for reading…

Written 3:19am 3rd March 2023

Abstract world

I hear the gold in your heart

It’s beating like a tin

It is thick with the taste of happiness

And it is wet with the fluid of youth and the lack of sin

Cherished by the cherry tree

By the birds and solidarity

Your voice is shrill like a mouse

Your voice is home, like a house

And I am warmed by your eyes as they burn into mine

I can smell your dreams

They flow like wine

Into a well of hope and future

Mending my wounds as the suture

And I am destined to stay with you

Because you are special too

We live in this daydream

Walking on the mist of clouded sleepwalk

How much I can hear you talk

Of all the mysterious things

Our existence is strange to the people

The earth ball round

They can’t hear the sounds we do

They are deaf and have no clue

We are different

You and I

This is why we walk on the sky

And we together we’ll be

For eternity

Alone

I have always loved the abstract in poetry, film and sometimes art.  I have also always love innovations in absurdism and surrealism in all art forms – though I have to admit I treat them all with guilty pleasure, as these things are rarely understood by the world and are often shunned as being too weird.

I often want to write whole stories and songs like this, but it’s so very niche really and I don’t like how some people will try to dissect the art and prose to try to make sense of it, or me – or worse, to presume that I have some kind of deep mental problem or something along the lines of substance abuse, simply because I can put my mind into far-out places!

A school teacher of mine in the last school I ever went to, called Mr Kingham saw how much of an abstract, absurdist thinker I was and tried to get me to take art seriously in school – but I never did.  Because it was not an encouraged thing at home; he was so proud of a statue I made in abstract of a guitar, that he insisted that he had to take it home and keep it forever for himself as it was too brilliant to just throw away at the end of the school year!

My parents never understood the excitement in him, nor why he would insist that out of all my achievements art supreme in me.  I never understood it either, I don’t reckon much of my art – my paintings and drawings that is, and even my abstract poetry.

I think it is nice to play with them – but is it really contributing to anything?

I have an over-analytical mind at times – yes I am playful, yes I can do this and the above I enjoyed doing a lot!  But I can’t help but think that other people will find it all a stupid waste of time?

There has been hundreds of poems similar to the above, I have deleted since having my blog after deciding that I might be too embarrassed to share them after all.  Hundreds might be an understatement.

There are times where I stop writing my novels, because my thought has become too abstract, that I have to put it away and rethink them for normal brains. 

Such as I am having a serious rethink about my description in project AD!

The description in project AD is based entirely on what a wild animal would perceive of things when it has been bought into the human world – how would a wild hare view newspapers strewn over a floor?  To me that is a simple idea, obviously they are the weirdest shaped leaves I ever did see with speckles of black all over them and white and snow!

The strange shaped logs that the two legged creatures sat upon groaned like some tortured squashed animal.  I mean, could you really read a novel like that?

As much as I love to write it, I worry about how it’s going to be received!

Yes I often hold back in this kind of description for a lot of my work, but it soon gets boring when I do.

Sometimes I think outside of the box so much I find it hard to get back into the box!

I love wild and out there ideas, hence my obsession with stories such as Alice in Wonderland and through the looking glass, Wizard of Oz fourteen books, the arc of the scythe series, His dark materials and such the likes.

As a child my imagination often ran away with me, I didn’t need to see scary things when the light was off, I saw them when the light was on! 

A mere pile of clothes on a chair could take on some weird shape of an abstract multi-coloured witch and the pigeon on the window ledge cooing sounded like some awful mischievous chuckle.  I often found myself over the years fantasising about making mini art movies based on those kinds of imaginings, but I don’t have the wherewithal to know what I am doing!

Last year when I made a post called “The spider’s suicide note” https://tardycreative.com/2022/07/30/a-spiders-suicide-note-or/ I actually wanted to rush off and make a mini movie about it and really make a thing about it with noir 1930s detective kind of slant to it – but I don’t know how to do these things and I don’t have anyone to help!

But it can be bizarre and spontaneous and it can be hard to hold off for a while waiting for things to be done, because by that time the inspiration would have left me!

I wanted to join Skillshare to learn the technology for all of that, but I can’t afford an annual subscription taken out in one lump sum like they are requesting nowadays!

I am really upset about that actually, because I was going to get ready to learn these things for YouTube and TikTok – but it’s going to have to wait until I save up for it.

The above poem is heavily inspired by Bjork and Aurora, I love those women!

Let me know of what you think of all the above… do you get abstract ideas like these or are they beyond you?

Thanks for reading!

Poem for a pet rock!

I found you once under my door

I turned my ankle a bit

I looked at you and thought to myself

You little…

You were kicked aside a week or so

I didn’t appreciate you then

But I got bored one winter’s night

And that is when…

I took you in and washed you down

I painted you up real nice

And gave you googly eyes

And sent you to a shelf paradise

Rocco you are my rock

My pillar and my friend

I can’t believe I kicked you once

I sound round the bend…

But never mind what people think

You and I are good

I take care of you anyway I can

Like anyone could

Junk Journals and steampunk collages

Experimenting with steampunk in my art is very difficult as there aren’t many references I can get my hands onto easily in this area, my main source is DeviantArt and Pinterest but I would rather have a paper source in my hand. 

I have however, decided that creating my own references via junk journaling may be the easiest way to find the kind of images I want.  For some reason or another sculpting and collaging is easier for me to do than drawing or painting.  But I want to be able to draw what I see in my mind’s eye!

Junk journaling is something I am venturing into a lot lately because I love that sort of thing, shabby chic and collaging pretty things together, with stitch work and crochet; but I had thought about bringing in charms and brass objects to create steampunk collages for myself, in order to create the characters and sceneries I see in my mind, so I have the visual references I want.

My money is limited, so it will be several weeks before my first collage will be done, but I think by and large, this is the easiest way for me to hone my steampunk art skills.

Happy reading everyone!

Perceiving art wrong

Since the dawn of this blogs existence I had intended for this blog to be a journey about my life and progress as a writer as well as an artist; it is quite obvious that I get distracted from this aspect of the blog a lot.

The update for today is that I have decided to take my artist-self more seriously in a less serious manner than before; I have grown in confidence regarding my place in the creative world in general because I have had a huge epiphany and that epiphany slapped me in the face and left me in awe of how simple it all really is.  I used to believe that in writing as well as art that there are certain rules you must follow in order to be a creative person, especially a creative person who is to be taken seriously by the world – but it can’t be further from the truth.  The moment you start to become serious in your creative field, it is the moment you start killing your creative self. 

How did I learn this?

As a means to start learning about art so that I could take it more seriously, I decided that my art looked a lot like three particular genres in the art world, abstract, impressionism and abstract expressionism.  But I wasn’t confident I understood abstract art well enough to dare call myself an artist in that field – perhaps I need to evaluate everything and see a deeper meaning in everything in everybody else’s work in order to appreciate my own and have other people appreciate it first.  In other words, I felt like my lack of knowledge of the art world and lack of experience meant that I felt like a fraud.

So I got reading and researching online a lot about art, particularly abstract art and abstract expressionism to help me to understand it more and perhaps even help me to understand myself more and why I might like that art.  The thing is – I learned that the best way to appreciate this genre of art is to give up all cognitive reasoning and see what you want to see, art is what you like.  Art is what you see.  Art is not about trying to imprint an impression on the observer, it is literally purely about aesthetic and your own feeling toward the art as an individual.  It is an act of freedom, which helped me understand a core thing about art and society’s opinion regarding art and that is that art is seen as an act of rebellion to some cultures.

Learning that one thing about abstract art “give up cognitive reasoning” felt so freeing that it bought about euphoria so to speak.  I understand now that there really are no bounds in art and that means the same for writing and anything else which may be considered creative.

People, who try to define art, assess it and or dissect it, kill it.  They kill it for themselves and not only that, but they unwillingly become a sort of fascist regarding it.  They can’t help it, they haven’t learned that fundamental rule that creative expression in all forms, painting, writing, music, sculpting etc., is all about freedom and your own personal feeling about the piece whatever it is.  They haven’t learned that art means you can be free and express yourself, that you don’t need a meaning, it can just simply be pretty, but usually everything a creator does, does have meaning, because we are all creatures of our subconscious and our dreams or nightmares even.

A simple little thing like this, can keep millions of people both stumped and afraid of the art world.  I believe it is why many people do not go to art galleries, they feel that art is beyond them and yet everybody in this world has indulged themselves in art daily and buy art regularly, they just don’t see those kinds of arts as important as those from the big fancy galleries such as The Tate Modern.

They don’t see the art on a can of beans or on their favourite CD album, they don’t see that they had paid for that art in some way and that some artist somewhere thanks them for their purchases, because all they are interested in is eating those beans and hearing their favourite singer on the stereo.

They see a beautiful painting mass produced at some major store and take it home with them as it is nice above the fireplace and they do not realise the process that that piece of art had undergone, they might not know the name of the artist even – yet there it is, seen by them every day without a thought about it other than “isn’t it pretty”?  These same people sit there drinking their beverages unaware of just how involved they have been throughout their life in art, how you don’t need a degree to understand or appreciate it.  There is no reason to be intimidated by art when you are literally drowning in it everywhere you go.

I think for many – I know this to be true in my family.  We have people, who are great artists in our family, but they are afraid to do it as a living because they believe that in order to be a good artist who can sell their work, they need to have a certain amount of intelligence and understanding for it.  I thought this myself ten years ago and still to a certain extent yesterday, before I read that post.  Wrong.  We are all so wrong.  If you can make shapes on a piece of paper, if you can write words or play a piece of music on an instrument, you are engaging in an art form.  When you daydream and you wish, you are engaging in an art form.  When you shoot photographs from your mobile and duckface with your friends, you are engaging in an art form.  Yes, art can be silly, because it can be anything!

I understand today that mocking art is a form of social suppression; it is an act of coercive bullying to keep someone from expressing themselves in the manner that they wish to express themselves.  The point of art is freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of speech and much more.

Some abstract art can look as though a toddler did it, but so-what?  The best forms of mental health therapy are those which involved releasing your inner child and nurturing it via self-parenting; I should know, I have been there and because no therapist can help me with my mental health I have learned to parent myself and I have learned to play with my inner child a lot.  This has got me through some tough times.  Not only that but random nonsensical splashes of paint on a canvas can be very beautiful and encapsulating.  I remember last year, I spilled rose gold ink on my sketch pad and I dabbed at the spillage with a tissue and when I pulled it off the paper I noticed by sheer dumb luck that the tissue had made a pattern that looked like a bunch of roses, so I dabbed around the whole paper and made a beautiful rose sheet of writing paper.  A happy accident, but art is formed as simply as this.

In fact, a lot of my art never started as a plan, it started as accidents or deliberate accidents.  For example, I will take a spoon of paint and let it drip or splash onto the paper for a couple of seconds, sit back and think about its shape and I let the paint tell me what it is going to be that day, then I select further colours for the piece.  I like to play, I never grew up and it is something I pride myself on.  I will do the strangest things in art and writing in order to come to the conclusions that I do; such as taking a pencil and putting it between my toes and try to draw a decided shape, such as a line or a circle or a triangle, just one thing.  I will say to myself that after ten seconds of trying this, I will stop and see what I have got and then work with it.  I do this with a pencil between the teeth, with my non-dominant hand, with splashes of paint, with a tissue or some other item dipped into paint and the result is always astounding.

I once decided I would create a picture of an ocean with a yacht and I accidentally spilled too much paint onto the ocean and dabbed it away, again with tissue, this time it left a big white imprint on the paper which was shaped like a cosmos flower and to me, all the picture then needed was a green stalk to the flower head and the picture was done.  I never did the picture with the yacht after all.

Little games like this can do wonders for your creativity.  I often play games of hypothetical situations regarding a theme I am interesting in at the time and this often gives me ideas for new projects in writing – the problem is, I do this daily and for hours sometimes and I am more full of ideas than I am actual work!

I am one of these people who can make a picture of a story out of any idea, but I seldom sit down and do it because I enjoy the process of thinking too much!

I often joke that when the technology comes where we can record our imagination and dreams and show it to others, then and only then I will be the hardest worker in the creative world!

Thank you for reading and please remember, art isn’t complicated your perception of it, is.

A dying spirit

I need to get this off my chest, I apologise if the following becomes a long-winded rant and it is not my intention.

But I simply can’t do it anymore – I cannot live up to other people’s expectations and other peoples idea of what is or is not morally correct or what is or is not true; Everything that I talk about regarding my current life and my past are all true in my eyes, but a lot of people will deny that it is the truth and I can understand why they would lie about that – they are trying to socially protect themselves because they treated me wrong and don’t want the ramifications of how others may perceive them for it.  I appreciate their feelings on this, but I won’t hide the truth, I won’t keep deleting things just because the truth fucking hurts them, they never take into account how much their actions have hurt me so why the fuck am I so bloody accommodating to them?

I have rights too, I have a right to express myself anyway I blooming need to in order to heal.  Living a life of quiet pacification is literally killing me as a person and me as an artist/writer.

Living the life that my previous abusers want me to, is killing the person that I am in every way shape and form that a person can be!

I took on this blog back in winter of 2012 purely as to act as a form of therapy for myself as recommended by my therapist, he suggested I talk freely about everything I want to regarding my life, he recommended that I also use it to bring back the creative person I was again.  It worked until some people found out a few things about my mum they never knew before and they like defensive little minions went and told her and defended her and grouped up on me via telephone and emails to hound me to tell everybody who reads my blog that everything I said was a lie.  They wanted me to lie about the truth I told – they demanded then that I go to London again and at a family gathering literally grovel for my mother’s forgiveness in front of them!  I am quite serious about what I just said; they did demand this of me!

Every time I say something about them on my blog, I do run the risk of anyone in my family still sticking around to read what I am saying, relaying and potentially getting telephone calls and emails again, which is why I had to change the telephone number and we are considering moving because of this, because I can’t be silent anymore.  I need to express everything I have gone through and I feel it is my calling to help others who have gone through the same coercive upbringing as I have, by talking about my past.  A coercion that I was raised in is quite unusual but not unheard of and many people who have experienced this kind of abuse rarely talk about it, because of how violent a large amount of people can get if they hear of it.  You see it is usually lead by one individual who has a large social circle who will act like posse to reign in the abused child if they start getting out of hand or rather, start becoming independent and so-called rebellious to their clique ideologies. 

It rather like living with a mafia minded family with an extended social circle of friends all of whom think alike, like a big extended hive mind. 

This kind of abuse is hard to deal with for a lot of therapists; I have never found one who has been able to help me.  They all suggest that various people of whom have taken a part in controlling me should go and see them, but who the fuck will go up to their abusers and say “you know what?  My therapist wants to see you as I seem relatively stable in comparison to you guys”.  Lol – no one is going to do that and the therapist appreciates that for safety reasons it is probably best not to suggest it.

You know how badly the revelation to my mother has affected me? 

I became for a long time now, primarily a poet who occasionally dips into abstract impressionistic paintings, because I have been scared to talk about anything anymore.  I have even been told that some of my novels I used to write, that the family often used to read, that they see now that some of the things in my fiction work could actually be based on my supposed “poor abused childhood fantasy life”, to a certain extent a few of the themes in my stories are based on my own personal experiences, but I understand enough to know what is true and what isn’t.  That is my fiction.  The stuff I talk about regarding my life is TRUE and I state this quite clearly, the message has not been mixed!

Because I am struggling to appease my abusers so they don’t come back into my life in an aggressive way, I have almost ignored a lot of my creative expression via words and non-fiction posts.  This has led to me becoming so severely depressed that it is affecting my health badly.  I have a lot of problem with mobility of the whole of my left side of the body and I have extreme insomnia and hypersomnia – what I mean is, I can’t sleep for like 30 hours and then when I do I can’t wake up for 15 hours and sleeping comes randomly at any time and once I feel just a tiny bit tired, it is almost like I have collapsed into a coma.  Nobody can wake me up, not even Henry having a tantrum on the bed next to me; it is like I have died!  Quite often, the last thing I think about when I go to sleep is “I hope I die in my sleep – I don’t want to wake up, I don’t like the burden of my memories”.

My appetite is dead, I only eat when extremely hungry now and it is usually just one meal per day and around the side of a sandwich, coincidentally I am losing a huge amount of weight pretty quickly and my hair is around 60% white now.

To say the suppressors are literally killing me by using my own mind against me is an understatement.  I find no joy in anything anymore.  Everything about the sweet, bubbly, fun, obedient, passive, quiet, little Tina everybody once knew is dead.

In trying to force me to be their idea of perfect instead they have made me their idea of a waste of space.

For my health and sanity sake I have to heal the only way I know how.  So I am taking a risk, if they get back into my life again somehow, so be it, I am ready for the repercussions because the alternative is death anyway.  I am going to die someday anyway, why is sooner no better than later?  Would I rather die in secret of how I died and be a mystery to all who knew me forever, or do I want to die in a way where other people can understand me and understand my situation and perhaps, just maybe, stop this from happening to other people?

I know which one I have picked.

The thing is – before they interfered and demanded me to delete and shut up, I was only sharing what I thought was the minor stuff, the stuff that isn’t too big to shout about.  The stuff that is easy for my readers to digest – but now they’ve done this, maybe it is time for the real big stuff, the stuff that makes my therapists cry?  That stuff I kept to myself, that stuff I never revealed and I don’t think people like my big brother, understand there is an even darker side to our mother, than even he realises!

I don’t like talking about that stuff, because I hate remembering the really, dark, dark stuff, but how I express it here, sometimes it comes out sub consciously through my abstract impressionistic art and the images I paint are also not easy to digest for a lot of people.

But I think it is time to just be me in every way shape and form and not hide from myself anymore.  I can’t.  Shutting me away in every way possible is suffocating my spirit and body to death, I need to free myself and that makes taking big scary risks!

Because I am pretty damned sure, since November, my body and spirit is preparing to die.  I am convinced of it and I need to stop this process – not for me, but for my boy.  I care only for him, not these coercive “I have a problem with your life and truth” assholes!  No one can have a bigger problem with my life and truth than ME!  Get over yourselves you control FREAKS!

Abstract fantasy me portrait

Here is a self portrait in abstract, ink and sharpies or at least what I think I would look like in a ruff, lol.  

Rose for the first day of Inktober!

 

A rose for the first day of Inktober.

Here is my first ever attempt at working with traditional Winsor & Newton inks and it is for the first day of Inktober, which is today!
It’s a lovely rose in a frame, ink colours include, gold (yes finally bought some) mixed with apple green, there is scarlet mixed with white to make pink. I have been told by my husband and a friend that this should be considered for a Valentine’s Day card, never really thought about doing that, but I can see where they get the idea from!

Inktober challenge 2018

 

Tomorrow is the start of Inktober and Wednesday is my 36^th birthday, yesterday Paul (my husband) and I went out to select my birthday presents and I chose to concentrate on stocking up my art supplies.  I chose to take on two new Medias this month, inks and oil paints.

As you can see in the photographs I have eight different colours from the Winsor and Newton range, traditional black Indian ink, apple green, silver-metallic aluminium, purple, blue, scarlet, sunshine yellow and peat brown; I wanted gold but they were sold out, so I have to buy them another time.  I didn’t realise until I had got home that these inks are mixable, which meant that I would have needed the white I saw there, to mix with the scarlet to make a sort of pink colour.  I learned this by watching some YouTube videos which showed me how to use the ink for various effects in art.

I am very new to inks in this format, usually I draw with inks from felt tip pens and biros, but I wanted to do something a little more traditional – so I bought a dip pen for drawing and mapping to help me, I was tempted to pick up the big black feather quill I saw there too, but I forgot to put it in the bag at the end of my shopping trip, I was limited to a budget of £75, so I wanted to see if I had more money for it at the end of the trip, I did, but I forgot it.

I also bought a pack of 28 limited edition sharpies that are fine permanent markers, another thing I have never used before.  Now all of this didn’t cost me £75, there were other things I bought too – but I took a photograph of the things I specifically bought for the start of Inktober, which is something I am trying to do very seriously this year.  I have also bought a pink mixed media sketch book with forty pages, specifically for this event. 

For those who are not in the know, Inktober is an annual event which lasts for thirty one days throughout the whole of October, where artists are urged to use inks in their art in at least one picture per day and to record these pictures on social media – the idea was bought about by a guy called Jake Parker, it’s a sort of NaNoWriMo for artists.

I am hoping that my best friend in the art world, Erin Cooper is going to do Inktober as seriously as she normally does this year as before now, I have never took on the challenge as seriously as I aim to for this year – it would be fun seeing what each other can do this month.

So, the challenge starts on October the 1^st, all you need to do is draw with inks daily, until Halloween and you’ve officially passed Inktober, miss a day and you can go to the imaginary Wall Of Shame!  Well that’s what I will do to myself, if I miss a day, lol.