Category: DIY Art School

Life Seasons

The weather is changing. It is warmer outside, and the flowers are blooming. I’ve seen crocuses and daffodils and plum blossoms. Where I live, winter is changing into spring.

Pages from my nature sketch book.

I think that life has seasons too. When I was younger, there always seemed to be plenty of time. I had extra energy and time to study whatever I want.

As I grew older, I added more responsibilities and had less time and energy leftover. Seasons changed. Fortunately, seasons can change again. I am currently in a season where I have more time to devote to my interests.

A couple of people sketches from the November 2017 Ensign Magazine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Why is this important? Recently I have spoken to friends who are mothers of small children. Some of them are also working as well. They admire the work I’m getting done, and sound depressed when they say that they don’t have time to do something similar.

I completely understand. When my children were younger, I didn’t have extra time, either. Now that my children are a little older and more independent, I have more time.

There were times back then, when I was not getting enough sleep and my to-do list was always longer than my done list, that I felt like that’s how things would always be. I couldn’t imagine anything changing. My life stretched before me, and it seemed rather bleak.

It didn’t help to talk to moms of older children who told me that things only got busier. They told me that the children would have so many events and activities that I wouldn’t have time to breathe. It was not reassuring.

Daily sketches of my kids. They only hold still for me to sketch them when they are reading or watching videos.

It was also not completely true. There are more activities that an older child can participate in. Babies don’t usually play sports or sing in a choir. But, older children can sleep through the night. Older children can make themselves a sandwich. Older children can entertain themselves for two hours straight reading a good book.

Seasons do change. Difficult times, even very difficult times, do not last forever. Just because you cannot see a point in the future where things change doesn’t mean it’s not there.

There was a time when I didn’t feel like I had the energy to do anything more than I was doing. That was okay. Sometimes you have to just hold on and get through the tough times as best as you can. Being upset at yourself for not being able to add something small to your routine will not help your stress levels.

If you want to add something creative to your routine but it’s not working, give it time. Try again later when things are less crazy. Maybe it’s not the right season yet. Fortunately, seasons change. One day, time and energy may bloom in the corners of your schedule, and you’ll realize that spring has finally come.

Do you feel like life has seasons? Have you felt the seasons shift? What season are you in now?

Filling the Well

In her book, “The Artist’s Way,” Julia Cameron talks about how to overcome writer’s block and burn out. She says that when we are creative, we draw on our life experiences. When we draw from the well too often without replenishing it, we eventually come up empty. We are left relying on the same old stories, or cliches and tropes, or worse, we can’t come up with anything at all.

Creativity is important. It’s not just used for creative endeavors like painting a picture or writing poetry. Creativity helps us solve problems in our daily lives. It assists whenever we communicate or create something new. It is essential. If you are feeling burnt out and stuck, and you aren’t sure why, it might be time to refill your well.

Julia recommends regular walks, keeping a journal, and regularly scheduling time for activities that bring you joy.

The journal is three pages of whatever you are thinking about. It’s meant to be a way to unload your worries and concerns. The activities can be small, like coloring in a coloring book or visiting a furniture store or going to a museum. It can be anything that you can look forward to and that takes you out of your normal routine.

Some of my comic diaries about various activities I do to refill my well. Inspired by Brittany Olsen’s “Comic Diaries.”

Another idea for filling your well is mindfulness. When you get too caught up in your thoughts or a screen that filters the world through other people’s thoughts, then you aren’t really experiencing the world around you. Taking time present in the moment makes food taste better, and it makes the colors around you seem brighter. You notice details that you overlooked before. You feel more free, and the experiences you fill your well with are richer.

Service is a great way to fill your well. It connects you with other people and the outside world. For a moment, you are taken out of your problems and focus on someone else’s. Being an outside observer helps you enter problem-solving mode more easily, and it can jump start your creativity. Service can have the added bonus of building relationships, making your problems seem a little smaller, and bringing you happiness.

If everything seems dark and pointless, and you can’t make yourself do anything, reach out. Tell a trusted friend. Talk to a counselor. Pray. Heavenly Father loves you, and He listens. There have been times where I hid in my closet and cried and prayed until I felt like I could face the world again. I have cried and prayed as I picked tiny game pieces off the floor for what felt like the thousandth time. I’ve prayed for help when I felt like everything is hopeless. The problems didn’t all go away, but they seemed manageable. I had hope and peace once more.

These are all suggestions I’ve tried. They worked for me. They may not all work for you. I hope they do. The world has an unending store of problems to solve. There are things waiting to be created that are beyond our current dreams. Fill your well and you can draw from it whenever you’re in need.

Have you ever felt blocked or burnt out? What did you do? How do you fill your well?

Turning Failure Into Success

Before I talked to Kathy Decker, I wasn’t regularly practicing drawing or painting. It was something I would do occasionally, when I felt like it. But Kathy recommended regular practice.

She told me about how much she’d improved after a year of drawing a face a day and suggested that I could try the same. She showed me some of the work she’d done. It was really good, and I wanted to draw and paint like that. So, of course, I agreed.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy to start a new habit. This is especially true when you have to develop new skills. It’s discouraging to continue to repeat something that always seems to end badly.

I would do really well for a few days. I would draw a face, criticize my results, and try again the next day. And after a few days of that, I just wouldn’t want to try again.

“Later,” I’d tell myself in the morning. And the afternoon. And in the evening, I’d be too tired, and resolve to try again the next day.

Kathy Decker was supportive and encouraging. “Have you been able to do some drawings?” she would ask when I would see her at church.

Sometimes I’d be able to say, “a few.” Other times the answer was, “No.” I would feel embarrassed and try again.

It was a hard time. Part of me wanted to avoid her so I didn’t have to admit that I’d failed again. The rest of me was grateful for the motivation to pick my pen up and try again. Her gentle reminders really helped.

In the end, I managed to start again and again and eventually I drew a face every day for a month. And then two.  I felt like I was finally finding success.

Having a string of days where I’d kept my goal was motivating. I dated my entries, and felt proud of the success in doing the work, even when I felt embarrassed by the drawings themselves.

But then the holidays came.  My schedule got busy and I missed two weeks.  And then we went on vacation and my kids were sick.

The two weeks off was difficult. It felt like failure. I spent another week trying to decide what to do. I sort of wanted to just give up. The drawings weren’t great, and it was so hard to make myself do them. Maybe I needed to admit that I wasn’t going to be an artist.

It was nearly Christmas, we were on vacation, and I was stuck in the hotel with sick kids. One evening, I pulled out my sketchbook. The kids were all asleep. I decided to go around and draw them in their sleep until I caught up with the days I missed.

By the time I caught up, the drawings were looking better than they ever had. I dated them for the days I’d missed. It was like it had never happened. Looking through my sketchbook, I now had my unbroken string of days back.

Failure turned into success. I returned to my goals with new determination to never miss again. And if I did, I decided to make up the missed days and just keep going. Even if I would never be a great artist, I decided that wouldn’t be because I quit.

I truly believe that you don’t fail until you stop trying. Even if you take three weeks off or three years off, if you resolve to try again, you haven’t failed. You can always return to your goals.

I have an unbroken string of days in my sketchbooks since that Christmas. A few of the faces were drawn on different days than the dates at the bottom of the page. I have no idea which ones those are.

 

 

I have been able to add new things to practice to my days since then. There are other things I’m still struggling to practice regularly. It can be discouraging in the beginning to keep trying and failing to reach my goals. Sometimes it feels like I just can’t make myself do the things I know I really do want to do, and it doesn’t make sense.

There is a quote that has often helped me in times like this. It’s one that I learned as a child in a lesson about Heber J. Grant. Heber J. Grant is a wonderful example of the power of persistence.

He often repeated this quote, but I believe it was originally said by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do—not that the nature of the thing is changed, but that our power to do is increased.”

Last Sunday I saw Kathy Decker in the hall at church. “Have you been drawing lately?” she asked me. It was a wonderful moment for me, because I could honestly say, “Every day. I draw every day.” It felt like the biggest success ever.

Are there things that you have succeeded to do after trying and failing to do them many times? Are there things you are still struggling to do? Are there goals you have made that you are trying to return to? What will you do to turn failure into success?

The Joy in Participation

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Art is different when you create it. You notice things, tiny details that you skip over as a member of the audience. I think this is true for all kinds of art.

Last weekend, I sang in a choir. We spent months practicing a dozen or so songs. Within a matter of hours, the performances ended, and we turned in our binders. In past years, I listened in the audience to this same choir perform. The experiences were very different.

Spending months with the songs, I learned the words. I learned the intricate harmonies and how they fit together. The songs stuck in my head between practices, and I hummed them as I washed the dishes. By the time we performed the songs, it almost seemed anticlimactic. I still hum the songs as I wash dishes. Though the performance is done, the music isn’t over.

As an audience member, I thought the music was lovely. Listening to it sparked so many ideas! I didn’t always understand the words, but that didn’t matter. Though I quickly forgot how the music sounded, I remembered how it made me feel and the impression of its loveliness. It was not the same lasting experience as singing in the choir.

When I copy an illustration I admire, I discover so many overlooked details, hidden faces and patterns and figures.

I find myself admiring an expression or the shape of a hand or a lovely combination of colors. “Oh, that’s how you do that,” I realize.

When I make just the right line here or match the right shade there, it feels like victory. You learn so much by doing. Copying art forces me to slow down and focus on details, one at a time.

I admire my favorite artists more after carefully trying to recreate their work.

This does not mean that I have to make a perfect copy or sing all the right notes to appreciate art. I make mistakes much more often than I like. I think the joy comes from putting in the effort and spending time seeing the intricacy revealed when you spend time in careful study.

A special joy comes when I create something of my own. Even if it turns out terrible, during the moments that I’m totally absorbed in writing or painting or singing, I feel outside of time. Completely focusing on how to make something work is a joy of its own.

Several of my illustrations. I love some of them and don’t love many of them. But they are mine.

It feels like the joy of solving a problem or putting together a puzzle. It’s that moment when you put another piece in, and it fits. There are many more pieces left to go, but in that moment when you realize that this one piece is in just the right place, there is that “aha!” of recognition. “Ah, I see. This is how it goes. I thought it did, and I was right! What is the next piece?”

I love to go to concerts. I love to look at artwork, even when I don’t have the slightest idea of where to begin to recreate it. I love feeling inspired. There is so much joy in finding loveliness in the world, and you can find it in so many places.

Yet there is a special joy found in participation. I think it enhances my appreciation of art when it’s my turn in the audience again, because I’ve learned to look and listen more closely. If I’m in the audience next year, I’ll probably enjoy the choir numbers much more than I did last year. But, after the hard work and practice I put in this year, I honestly hope that next year I’m in the choir.

Have you found joy in participating in art? What do you enjoy doing? Do you think it helps you better appreciate the work of other artists?

Prep Work

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Sometimes, I can just sit down and write, draw, or paint. However, sometimes art takes preparation. I suppose practice itself is a form of prep work. What other preparation do I need?

With writing, I keep a notebook of writing ideas. Once I’ve chosen an idea, I sit and think about it. I like to at least have a beginning and an ending and some scenes in the middle planned before I start writing. If it’s a complex or longer story, I like to have an outline to follow. It’s usually not especially detailed, but it gives me some direction.


A page of one of my story ideas notebooks.

I still get surprises as I write, and sometimes I have to change my plans or do some rewriting when the story veers off course. Having a plan keeps me from having that awful moment where I realize that I have no idea where I’m going with this. It also makes it easier to just keep writing. It works for me.

In Toastmasters, we practice planned and impromptu speeches, because life has both types. In my drawing, I practice drawing the picture in pencil, making sure to get all the proportions right, and then drawing over it in ink with more detail or looser lines. I also practice sketching in ink without any prep work. I think both help train my hand and eye in different things.

Each step of my reproduction of Quentin Blake’s “ABC” Ss. Reproduced by me on 2-4-19

Painting requires the prep work of a mise en place just like when cooking. In addition to gathering and placing tools and fresh water and paint, the painting surface also must be prepared. For example, watercolor paper needs to be taped or stapled to a board.

Then you can draw an outline of the image you want to paint in pencil, or project it from underneath using a light desk, or project it onto the surface with a projector. Many believe a device similar to the projector, the camera obscura, was used historically by painters such as Vermeer. It’s really helpful to have a guide to follow so that you get all the proportions and distances correct. It’s horribly discouraging to spend hours on something and then realize that because you were working as you go, a small error led to everything looking wrong in the end.

I love recreating the illustrations John Tenniel drew for “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice through the Looking Glass.” 

In a watercolor class I took last spring, the teacher talked about this kind of prep work, and said that she often has students who get really upset when they hear about it. They say that it destroys their view of art and artists to learn that they might use projected images or other kinds of painting aids. I wonder how they feel about outlines for writing or recipes or sheet music?

For my graphic novel pages, I draw a thumbnail sketch. It’s small so that I don’t feel pressured to spend a lot of time on it or work out all the little details. It’s for planning out the flow of the panels and their content. The pages themselves are drawn in pencil, then inked, then erased, then scanned and colored digitally.

Step by step through one of my graphic novel pages, from thumbnail to publication. Click here to read my graphic novel, “Isaac’s Illustrated Adventure.”

In some ways, the pages I’m posting to my website are prep work. If I prepare them for publication at some point, I will redo them using the pages I have now as prep work for more polished, better done pages.

Planning ahead usually produces a better end result. It’s true when packing for a trip, or buying groceries for the week, or teaching a lesson at church. It’s also true in art. Knowing that I’m prepared also helps me feel calmer and more confident as I work. I like the times I just sit down and draw or paint, too. Sometimes the results can be surprisingly good. Unfortunately, they can also be surprisingly terrible. Preparation gives me more consistent results.

What kind of preparation do you do for your art? Do you always prepare in the same way? Do you sometimes skip the prep work? How do the results compare?

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The Audience

Be My Audience!

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While it’s important to make art that you are happy with, that doesn’t mean that a wider audience doesn’t exist. It’s up to the artist to determine how much that audience will see of their work. Some artists, like Emily Dickinson, are happy to keep most of their work to themselves. Others exhibit their work in shows and galleries.

I have heard that writers write best when they have a specific audience in mind. In some ways, this is true for art. When there is an audience in mind, it can help you make decisions as you work. How much the idea of the audience influences the work probably depends on a variety of factors.

For me, there is an audience in mind with each individual piece, often depending on my goals for that work. For example, doodling in my notebooks helps me sit still during meetings and is only meant seen if I tip the page to someone sitting next to me to let them in on a joke.

In high school, I had a pen pal from Australia, and we spent a lot of time decorating the margins of our letters for each other.


These are my notes from a recent Sunday at church. I love capturing my thoughts with pictures in the margins!

I put the Illustrations for my stories up on my blog for anyone to see.


Illustration from my story “Anything You Want to Be” published on 2-13-19.

Practice work is just meant for me.

Being an audience member can be educational. I took a watercolor class at the community college last year. It was fun to have everyone working on the same assignment and see how different the pieces were. It was informative in the way that art videos are, where you get a chance to see someone’s process and how they solve the problems on the page.

An audience is helpful to the artist as well. Knowing some one is watching is great for motivation. There is some pressure to do your best work.

If they are expecting you to show up, there is pressure to actually show up and do something. This might be a friend that you meet once a week to paint with, or a blog where you post a painting twice a week. Feeling accountable is great motivation.

While the best and most reliable feedback comes from a trusted mentor, an audience can also provide some feedback. They can give you comments or suggestions that you can decide to take or ignore. They can provide support and encouragement. Just knowing that someone out there cares enough to look at your work and tell you what they think without being asked is encouraging. (As long as they don’t hate your work. There is always that risk. Then you just have to do your best to recover and move on.)

As I said in the beginning, the wider audience does exist. None of us are truly alone. How much of our work we share is up to each artist and their goals. So is how much you keep the audience in mind as you work. There are choices, and it’s up to you to choose.

What are your thoughts about the audience to your artwork? Is it something that you keep in mind as you work? How do you share your work? Comment below!

Be My Audience!

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