Daily Creative Update-Painting!

Some of you have been wondering if I've been keeping up with my daily creative practice and the answer is YES! but not in exactly the way that I wanted to.

I have been making something every day, whether it's painting, drawing/sketching, making jewelry or writing.

Posting regularly hasn't worked for me and here's why: 

When I started consistently posting my art work, I started to feel like I had to make art that was post-worthy. That it had to be a certain quality or at a certain stage before I could share it. 

THIS is exactly the type of thinking that shuts creativity down and shrivels her up. She does not want to make things for you to comment on or not comment on (she sees that as judgement and judgement=poison.) She wants to be free to make whatever she wants, even if it's ugly. 

If I start trying to make art that's just pleasing, I will get stuck in a trap that usually leads to not making any art at all.

That's what makes feedback hard for artists. That's what makes selling our work hard too. If you say you like something or you buy along certain lines that we make, we tend to get stuck in only making that type of work, because it's what "works well" or what's "successful" or "what sells". That keeps us from branching out, expanding and taking our work in totally different directions (think of actors who get typecast in certain roles-it makes it harder to break out and do something totally different.)

That doesn't mean we don't seek your praise (because we LOVE it) or want you to buy our work (that's why we put it up for sale in the first place.) It's just that creativity can be a fragile thing and we need to recognize when we're falling into patterns that can silence her.

So my plan is to keep on creating daily and then share whatever ends up feeling sharable-that feels much better.

Here are some things that I've been playing around with lately:

 I love how chunky and textural the oil pastels make this.

 

 This has several layers of paint and pastels.

 

I've been adding oil pastels over my acrylic paint and I'm loving the vibrant color and creamy texture it adds. I can't imagine why I never got too into this before? It's especially satisfying on my art journal covers. They seem to have a great texture for it.

This past weekend I attended a wine and paint class. This is always a bit strange for me because I teach them, but I always learn something from how the instructor presents that helps me make improvements or gives me new information to share with people interested in teaching wine and paint classes. 

During this class, we had only a few colors to work with, which was a great practice for making do. It made my creative self all squirmy because I wanted purple and magenta and orange! But I had blue and green, black and white. At the end, we got a little yellow. So, with just a few colors to work with, I got busy mixing and blending and creating lighter and darker tones.

I think I will use this as a sample painting for one of my own classes, as it does not look like the teacher's demo. painting and really is my own creation. I actually do have a similar painting that I use in my classes that has a cat sitting on one of the limbs.