I’ve been a little quiet here lately because I have been getting my Easter shop ready. The shop went live successfully on Friday!
One of the main characters you’ll see on the site is our Snowy Day gnome. While things aren’t very snowy around here, this is a quick last peek at the wintery days.
The Snowy Day gnome is available in 5X7″ and 8X10″ prints. Also on a blank card that you can use to send a note to a friend. Check everything out here.
I don’t know about you, but I know that when I start to get overloaded or burnt out, my studio work is the first thing to suffer. I don’t sit and sketch or create, I just feel too overwhelmed. But art is my outlet and my battery recharge, so why wouldn’t I want to do it?
Unfortunately, I am actually asking, I don’t have a solution here.
The biggest thing I can think of, is when I am tired and my brain is worn out, it is that much harder to shut out the nay-saying voice in my head. “What if you mess it up?”, “You’ll get all of those paints out and just waste your time.” Anything like that. I put a lot of pressure on my illustrations to make sure that they come out right, and maybe battling those demons is just not what I am interested in in that moment.
How do I deal with it? I keep a variety of creative things at the ready. If I want to write, I have the blog posts. If I want to draw, there’s so many tools on hand. I know that creating with my hands is how I get into my zone, so I make it easy to ease into that by having just colouring supplies and a colouring book on hand. Maybe doing a few little colour spaces will help me to get into a rhythm, or maybe I will just colour a full page that day. These are ideas for if, in your overwhelmed brain, you are worried about getting rusty or losing a studio rhythm or groove.
Sometimes you also just need a break. I watch a movie, read a book, just let the studio sit for a minute. The studio will be there for you when you are ready.
I can’t take credit for this, but it is too good of an idea not to share.
A friend shared this reel with me a while back and I’ve been wanting to make one ever since. I actually think that this would be great at my work work, when we are trying to coordinate the resources, people and programs at any given minute in a day lol. I have not done one just yet, but I do have plans in the future to give this a try.
What does your map look like?
Before the holidays a colleague at work commissioned an art piece. She asked if I knew of someone who worked in the style that she was looking for. I asked around but everyone was full for the year. I asked if she was comfortable with me taking it on, and we got to work.
She wanted a painting of her childhood home. She had a few pictures from a recent trip. We talked back and forth about the features that she remembers the most and what stood out as important to her.
Read more: Project – A childhood home commissionI started with a watercolour base on watercolour paper. When I got to the point where I felt I’d be risking the whole piece, I opted to move into Adobe Fresco. I was confident I could finish using all traditional, but given that this was an important piece for an important person, so close to Christmas, I didn’t want to risk ruining it at the last minute. Working digitally also made adding and removing features a lot easier (we both missed the second chimney on the first sketch).
Once we got into Adobe Fresco I was able to adjust the colours, and work through the finer details. Going digital took a lot of the pressure off and made the project a lot more fun!
She was so happy with the final result and I was so happy to take the project on for her. I hadn’t done something like this in a long time, so I was get excited to see how it came out. I’d really like to take on a project like this again in the future.
Check it out! I also have a video on some of the finer details through the development process.
I am the kind of artist who likes to find some way to make my art easier to create. How do I get to the creating faster? How do I bring this piece into the world RIGHT NOW? But that isn’t always what is best for the piece.
If you’ve been watching the livestreams recently, you’ll know that some pieces almost seem to fall out of the pencil, and others make me fight a little harder for it. The key is not pushing the final result.
Some pieces need you to take your time. Some parts of the process are slower for a reason. If you rush, you may not give the idea what it really needs.
This also falls into the category of not comparing yourself to others. Some processes are a lot quicker than others. There are so many factors here. Time with that style, hours of practice, understanding of the material, etc. Don’t compare your times to anyone else’s, especially in the creative world. Your art will take the time your art needs, let it breathe.
I don’t know about you, but I get A LOT of my illustration inspiration from the music that I listen to. More often than not, the resulting illustrations have nothing to do with the song or its message, but the song unlocks something, allowing those ideas through. Even with the disconnect, this illustration will always be tied to that song.
So let’s give that a try for this week’s prompt: Draw something based off of your most inspiring song.
Here’s mine. It is a little more directly linked, but it is inspired by “Kiss You Off” by the Scissor Sisters
I get a lot of questions about my work, be it my illustrations or knitting. “How do you do that?”, “How do you knit so fast?”, or comments like “I could never do that.” My gut reaction is to usually respond with a “yes, you can!”, which IS true, but we will get back to that in a different post.
What I want to talk about here is what came to mind when I sat and thought on these questions a little longer. What came to mind was the fact that we shouldn’t take our skills for granted. There are a lot of skills that I have worked very hard to get, those 10,000 hours of practice and such. But there are some that I have that really help me in different areas.
Example:
In knitting, I was always surprised with people struggling with a pattern. My thought is that, all I do is follow the pattern one step at a time. BUT this is not as simple as all that. Making a shawl, and making a pie crust, for me, is the same process (following a recipe), but the success rates are WAY different.
What I am really saying here, is don’t sell yourself short. Whether you have worked your 10,000+ hours to get to a skill, or whether something “comes naturally”, you have a skill set that others do not. Don’t just assume that everyone can do what you do, and that it is somehow lesser.
Whatever work you do, your skills add up to your creativity. Own them, flaunt them, and use them!
First prompt of 2024!
Do a self portrait! I have not done one of these in years. Putting myself in my art is something I find somewhat cringy, but sometimes it helps shed some light on what you have going on, and you might see something you didn’t before.
Full disclaimer, a little bit of AI was used for the character layout, but I assure you the final art is all mine. I had so much fun with this, and I hope you give it a try.
Here we go:
Read moreIt’s that time of year, and would you look at that I am already falling behind. Getting the shop (https://hues-tones.square.site/) up and running put a lot of things on hold.
Anyway… here we are for INKTOBER!!!! If you haven’t heard me ramble on about this on my lives, this is a great event to boost some creativity, restart a bit of a rut, or explore some old or new tools. I know a lot of people, myself included, have taken the opportunity Inktober presents to go back to some traditional art when they have been so digitally driven all year.
In the past I have had some themes on hand to help with some of the tougher words. Last year was masquerade masks, for example.
As I have been working on my shop update and running around like crazy here, I am thinking that I might not have enough in the creativity tanks to support 31 new illustrations. I do still want to participate though. I thieved an idea from one of the Inktober socials comments that I am going to try. I am going to use the prompts to write a little bit. I have a book of 300 writing prompts at home that I have been meaning to use. My thought is to take the day’s word and then blind pick a page in the prompt journal. I’ll combine both of those and write a fun little story.
I think that this is a great way to still participate, and feed a side of my creativity that I haven’t fed in yeaaaaars. Who knows where it might take us!
I feel like I have been neglecting this space a little bit lately, so I plan to post my daily writings as I am able to get them up online.
Are you participating in Inktober this year?
I worked on this painting throughout the year last year. I went in with absolutely no plan. I wanted to put paint on a canvas, so I opened it up and got going.
I started with a base of sludge paint. Then mixed some colours that I liked for a base, and just mixed paint around on the canvas until something appeared to me. I would work until the paint on my palette was done and then let it dry. I had it set up in my studio, so while I was waiting for files to load, I’d take a look and see what jumped out to me. Eventually I started to see two fish circling the page.
Read more: Project – Perfect ImperfectionI then started building up the background with blues and greens, and started building up the fish with golds and greens. This part of the process had a lot of iterations, I added more colours to make sure that we had some depth and shape to the whole piece. I worked around strokes that I liked, built those up and used them as guidelines for the flow of the water and shape of the fish.
I can’t recall if I had the idea for the fins before or after I put the white base down. I did get the zentangle idea when I was going through my Pinterest saves one day. There was a fish drawing with lace style fins. I was interested in doing more zentangle at the time so I thought that this was a great interpretation of that idea that would work well with this painting.
When building the fins I made sure to build a super solid but smooth white base. I wanted these to be a big contrast to the water in the background. I made sure that the white paint was dry for a few days before working the black over top. I didn’t want to clog up my good pens, and that dry time really seemed to help there.
I kept the zentangle and final outlines to be done as close to the very end as possible. I wanted to avoid painting touch ups and redos where I could.
Once the final details were done, I was ready for the final touch… the yarn.
Again, I didn’t have much of a plan going in to this. I started putting the nails in the canvas, equally spaced on the right half of the canvas. This was extremely nerve wracking. I haven’t done this before so I didn’t know how the frame would take it. Luckily all went well there. Once the nails were semi in place, I started winding the yarn to see what I liked. I started with a random pattern, took some photos, tried some other things. I was finding that the random approach was a little messy. So I laid a few ideas out in Illustrator using the grid I set up with the nails. I tested a few rhythms that were a little off symmetrical. Once I had one I liked I wound it up. I think that it really balanced out nicely there. I was originally going to use black yarn, but I found some navy yarn in my stash and I love it so much. I did try both but the navy yarn worked so well with the colours on canvas.
I am beyond thrilled with the final result on this painting. It is a great example of letting the art guide you into what it wants to be. I can’t wait to paint my next piece.
I did submit this piece for the Art Comp at the local 100 Kellogg’s Lane gallery. I was not chosen, but I am not discouraged. This means I get to display my piece in my own gallery (living room). More content to be submitted at another date.
Materials used:
Hues & Tones 