painting

Sketchybooks

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Right now, the thing holding my brain together is a sketchbook. Technically more of an art journal, which I already have, but this one is different. This one is dedicated to filling as quickly as possible. I grabbed the closest notebook to me, and the closest art supplies, and went all the way through, making frames around every single page in the darned thing. No thinking at all, just frames with liquid watercolor daubers that are mostly on their way to the great supply closet in the sky. Forget concerns about paper weight. Forget asking if it would be good enough. Nope, watch sketchbook videos on YouTube and continue until every single page had a frame.

This picture is actually from a different sketchbook, but it’s mine, and the idea is the same. This was me trying out a soft pencil and blending stump. The “help” text is mostly there because it fit in the box. Still, it’s pertinent. I don’t have pictures of the sketchbook I’m talking about at present, and probably won’t until it’s all full. I am thinking maybe a flip through at a later date.

Improv session ended a couple of weeks ago, and the next one will be, I think, in August. Right in time for Real Life Romance Hero’s birthday, which I will appreciate. Next month will see the six month mark of his passing, and it’s taken me that long to figure out what I want to do for a very private memorial. It will involve some of his favorite foods and fond memories. Nothing formal, but it feels right.

Some of the lessons from improv are finding good use in my current sketchbook practice. Housemate shows me the cool tag from her new clothing item. Do I want that for my sketchbook? Yes, please. Straw wrapper from a local diner that has “biodegradable” printed on it? On the page. Random papery bits I find while I excavate the doom piles? That’ll do. No overthinking, very little thinking, and actually very few words. That both surprises me and doesn’t.

Time moves differently in grief. An hour can take forever and then three weeks can whoosh past so quickly that they knock a person off balance. I don’t make the rules. The practice of throwing images and colors and shapes on the page does things for the story part of my brain. I’m not sure how that works. I’m not sure I need to know. What I do know is that this new sketchbook lives in a hard shell case that travels with me, at home and outside. Spare minutes? Sketchbook. Waiting in line? Sketchbook. No idea what to draw? No problem. Not great at drawing? Shapes. Lines. Squiggles. Colors. Textures. Slap it down and move on along.

Do I know how this is going to carry over into writing? I do not. Am I confident that it is getting me where I need to be? Yes, I am. As with improv, blurt. Say the next obvious thing. My challenge for this sketchbook is that I have to use things I already own, preferably only things within the case, plus found objects, such as the straw wrappers and clothing tags.

That’s where I am going to leave it, because it’s late, and I have commitments in the morning. This, too, is blurting. Plopping whatever is in my head into the blog, slap a picture down and hit “post.”

What’s your next obvious thing?

as always, Anna

Art Caddies Then and Now: Curated Possibilites

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Back in the 1980s, this right here was the pinnacle of my art supply dreams:

Reddit and nostalgia

I don’t remember if the jar pens were acrylic or tempera, but I think acrylic. Classic crayons (with sharpener) a basic set of markers, and a basic set of watercolors. I think I went through a couple of these, and am still chasing the thrill. My father was a fine and commercial artist, so I had been borrowing his supplies since I was tall enough to reach them. His father was also a fine artist (and structural engineer) and fine artists abound on his side of the family. Since I am adopted, I don’t share their DNA, but the art love came from somewhere in my genes.

Lately, I have been turning to my art supplies and journals to help me navigate the big life changes that come with a huge change in family dynamics. With all the chaos that comes with that sort of change, I crave order even more than I usually do. The caddy came to mind easily and I suspect that memory is going to stay. I don’t have one of these caddies right now, and it seems to be among the retired products, which is fine. Crayola is still The Stuff when it comes to crayons, according to me, and while my watercolor horizons have expanded, I still like the basic Crayola watercolors for casual journaling use. As soon as my great-niece is big enough, I plan to be the auntie who shows up with cool art supplies and is happy to join her in exploring them.

In the meantime, the complete overhaul of my living area includes room to spread out my art supplies and organize them in a way that makes sense. Some supplies are staying, others are going, and yet more are moving from the “maybe someday” to “burning daylight here, let’s try them.” I like working in art journals because I don’t have to show my work to anybody. There are no expectations, and if I don’t like the result, I can gesso over it, glue pages together, or collage on top. I would say tear out a page, but I don’t do that with bound books, which are normally what I use for this purpose.

What, you might ask, is this purpose? Isn’t this a writing blog? Well, yes. Writing, reading, pens and paper, journals, planning, mental health, grief, and all that stuff. It’s a multimedia experience right now. This week, I am writing scripts to relaunch my YouTube channel, where I can blabber about the things I do with ink (and other things) and paper. That about covers things.

mood tracker and mental health journal bag

Enter the modern variation. Well, one of them. These days, I like making kits for specific purposes. Above, is my mental health journal bag. The pink book is my mood tracker, with a year’s worth of inserts. The green book is therapy notes. I like being able to pick up one thing and have all I need for that purpose with me, no looking for needed supplies. Having a limited selection of supplies helps me focus not on the things, but what I can do with the things. For me, that shifts the focus from the tools to the expression, and that carries over well to writing.

For those wondering if I have considered looking for the OG Crayola Caddy on the secondary market, I have indeed, and let’s say it’s a collector’s item. That’s okay. My chosen art supplies have evolved, and so have I, so it makes sense that my storage needs will be different. What I use isn’t as important as how I use it.

illustrated image of a redheaded woman writing in a journal as her calico cat observes.
as always, Anna

Watercolors and Me: a Love Story

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Lately, I have fallen in love with watercolors. I’m not sure how it happened. Maybe it was part of my resolve to use my stash, but however it happened, I’m in and in deep. Do I know a lot about watercolors? No. Am I especially good at them? Also no. At the moment, I am mostly at the stage of figuring out how it all works, swatching paints, making pretty blobs, and watching endless YouTube videos on palettes and brushes and what sorts of pens work with the medium.

Right now, I am mostly planning on adding watercolors to my journal arsenal. There’s something almost meditative in plopping the colors on the paper and mushing them around. I even like when I flood the page too much for a wet on wet and paint goes places I didn’t intend. This reminds me strongly of writing. It’s alchemical, especially since I serendipitously found out that a book I wanted to read was included in my Spotify plan, so now I can listen to voices read me a story full of emotion and angst and hope, splash colors around and then boom, the next lines for a scene I’d been stuck on slipped in under the fence.

Apparently, I have found something that helps me get where I want to go. Therapy Dude will probably have something to say about that. Probably good things. My educated guess is that being in that space where I am new. where I don’t know all the rules, bypasses the perfectionist in me who, like a character in one of Melva’s and my upcoming books would say, you can’t fail if you don’t play. Technically correct, but not good for the long term.

At the moment, I am filling this journal with things like this. Squares, circles, rectangles. Squiggles on some pages, one turned into a worm or snake (could go either way) and then using the result at the base for more journaling in whatever form feels right at the time. Hopefully about the current WIPs, but we will see. In any case, it needs to be that raw and genuine and focused, but not pressured. Unless that’s pressure. In any case (augh, I said that already) the end product probably won’t look very much like it does at this stage, but I most likely will go back through it, several times, getting something new from it each time.

Sometimes a swatch is just a swatch. Sometimes it is a stepping stone to getting back in the groove. Last night, I put together a small watercolor kit, with a travel palette, water brush, mister bottle, and tiny pad of watercolor paper. I can take it anywhere. I don’t know that I plan on making “real” art (but isn’t all art real?) or sharing it at all, but I do know I want to do it more, and the more I paint, the more stories I want to tell. I call that success.

as always, Anna