Pirate Friday

A little pirate love for ya this Friday!

Fall NME

Here's a little of where I've been and what I've been up to. I swear, if it weren't for my NME journal I would forget all that I have done and accomplished. It's blank pages, staring at me daily hold me accountable, and my completed pages remind me that I am not frittering my days away, but rather that something is getting done. I SWEAR by this process created by Gina Armfield, it had added so much to my daily life in the form of life record as well as creative testing ground. If you haven't listened to me yet, NOW is a great time to start. The BEST time. Gina's 2013 program is ready to download and there is plenty  of time to get your book set up. Which is such a fun process!

Chad and I recently celebrated our 10 year wedding nniversary. So lucky and so proud!

Halloween. We went as Suzy Bishop and Sam Shakusky from Moonrise Kingdom of course!

A Little Bit of Birding...

I've been dabbling in Gina Armfield's Creativity in Flight watercolor class as of late. Here's a little example of how the image starts as a simple sketch and then gets layered with paint. This pice isn't quite done yet, I plan on adding some journaling to the background. It's super fun and relaxing. I hope to get in some more paintings while on vacation in Hawaii soon!

It's Been a Wes Anderson Sort of Summer

It's Been a Wes Anderson sort of Summer. Here are some recent pages from my NME journal. The top spread I did after I saw Moonrise Kingdom and had the inexplicable urge to draw each of the characters. Now I have the same desire to illustrate all the characters from each of his films. I attribute this to Scott C. Campbell who draws brilliant showdowns of movie heroes and villains. I am waiting for his rendition from the movie, which SURELY will come. I am deeply in love with Scott's book Amazing Anything, and I'm chompin' at the bit for his next release, The Great Showdowns.

 The bottom spread is a sort of tribute to The Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom. In typical Wes fashion I slammed the title over the images in Futura. There are general tidbits and things that remind me of MK and TRT. The lighthouse card on the left is by artist Becca Stadtlander and found a comfy spot on the page. For more info on the NME process, take a look here, and there is a cool video of it here as well.

Just Because

Wild Contradictions

Has anyone read the book Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon? If you haven't yet, give it a try. It is  one of those books that gives you permission to be just who you are as an artist. And that involves "stealing" from other artists. Not in a plagiaristic, copy-cat, I don't have any ideas of my own kind of way. Rather in an I'm influenced by many things, many artists, and genres all thrown in a blender sort of way. I love the concept of embracing our wild contradictions as people and artists. It is what makes us interesting as humans, though we often fight our divergences and contradictions as flaws.

After obsessing over Wes Anderson this week (after watching Moonrise kingdom twice, and re-watching The Royal Tenenbaums at the Boulder Outdoor Cinema (outdoor flicks are a deep love of mine), I can see how well he exemplifies this principle. His influences are wide and varied, familiar and obscure, intellectual yet nostalgic. We don't often see them coming even when they are pretty straightforward. All this input goes through some sort of Wes filter and comes out utterly unique to his vision. That was my big takeaway from Steal Like an Artist. That it's okay to have influences and to emulate, because whatever we do with authenticity is utterly marked by ourselves. Liberating isn't it? What if we tried embracing every flaw, contradiction, inspiration within us and worked really hard, imagine what we could create?

Needless to say, there are several other huge, eye opening ideas in Steal Like an Artist. I think I could read this book every week just to absorb it deeply enough to live it. If you are interested in some Wes Anderson influences, take a look here. Feel free to comment on this post, let me know who's out there!

Unsinkable

I recently saw a sculpture by an incredible local potter of a woman floating over a seal. I took my breath away. The figure was hovering above, supported and protected in a way by the seal. It was called Unsinkable. I can't tell you how meaningful that was for me. It is an image that I haven't been able to get out of my head and I knew there would be a journal page in it. I like this page a lot. The figure isn't perfect, but there will be chances to work on this idea more. I love stories of selkies, and I identify with seals (and otters) for their playfulness. They remind me of who I want to be and how I want to live.

 I created both of these pages in Juliana Coles' Altered States workshop. This page was a bit of a surprise for me. I was trying to do the assignment, but this page really evolved on it's own. It really became about the loss of my first home a year ago. I know it sounds silly, I live in a really great home in Boulder. There is so much that I love about it, my studio, the space, the deer that wander through my backyard. As a girl who moved around a lot growing up I've never really felt rooted, or like any place was really my own. Even when I moved to LA it was temporary, for grad school. I knew I couldn't stay there long term. Moving to Colorado was for me, for us, and my little house in Old Town Longmont was so me. Everything I always wanted. But life moves forward, and as much as I resisted, so did I. I wasn't ready to let go and move on, but the timing was right and we did it. I still mourned the loss of that home like it was a person, a part of me. And it was.

After that, things came to a head. My foot, my health, I felt like my whole life was unraveling. Where I'd felt rooted before, I began to feel untethered and unattached to where I was. Now I understand that while these feelings were valid, they were also symptomatic of what my overtaxed body was dealing with. But I get that this is a healing house. The place where I am learning my limits and am forced to change. And one little change opens up a world of options. My life is here now, but there is no telling where it will end up. Will we make our way back to the sea, closer to friends and family one day? I hope so. But there is no way to see that when you are in a warm cocoon with your eyes closed. I feel a bit like the phoenix rising from the ashes of destruction. A dramatic comparison for sure, but how can we get where we're going without a catalyst?