Exercising My Creative Chops

In an effort to keep myself in the creative habit, I bought the book Creating Art at the Speed of Life: 30 Days of Mixed-Media Exploration (Amazon Associates Link). It’s 30 exercises for 30 days to just create. Will I do them all in a row? I doubt it – I have noticed not only distinct lack of routine in my life but also a distinct lack of being able to create any! (Well, I do feed my cat wet food twice a day so I guess it’s a start.)

I also struggle with ‘playing’. Just sitting down and doing something for no other reason than to do it and see what comes of it. I find it interesting that someone who has created art in fits and starts her whole life has trouble playing. But then that might be why it’s in fits and starts. I think so much about how something will be before I even do anything which can really cause issues when something doesn’t go the way you want. Like the first exercise in the book…

First, just sitting down and getting started was (as usual) a process. I looked at the exercise, this is stupid. Why am I even going to do these? I probably won’t even like them.I looked at my journal. It wasn’t the right journal. Did I want to do basic exercises in this journal and ‘ruin’ it? (You know – ruin the book with this and this) Slide over to computer. Is Michael’s still open, to get a new sketch book? Ponder. Sigh. Really? We’re still doing this? I go get the coffee filter and sit down. Was going well… until violet. Ugh. Mud. I mean I made 4 or 5 attempts at this. Well, this is why we are practicing so I painted the violet slot the violet I got to and that was that.

The page background started out a nice soft yellow but I had all this paint from the violet violence and I started using it on a different page just to use it while the wheel dried but still had so much paint! So I slapped it on the page I was using for the wheel and was a little disappointed at my rash decision: now the PAGE was muddy! Ugh. I had some blue that hadn’t been used so I through some white in and slapped it on the page to try to help out the situation (did I just play?!). Better.

In the book, the author had just written ‘color wheel’ around the wheel but never really liking to do things exactly the way it says to do it or suggests doing it, I looked up quotes on color and found the one by Francis Bacon that I used.

All colors will agree in the dark.

– Francis Bacon

Do I love it? No. I find it a little embarrassing actually that I couldn’t make purple. But is it done? Yes. 1 down, 29 to go.