well technically we still have more than a month to go but i can feel it coming! the worst of the winter weather is hopefully behind us and it’s almost mardi gras here. not sure how that happened but here we are. last night was muses, my favorite parade; tomorrow is iris, always a fun day with friends on the napoleon neutral ground; and this year i really hope i make it to orpheus on monday. as for tuesday, i still have absolutely ZERO idea what i will wear for a costume. it’s likely i’ll be recycling pieces parts of old costumes or just dressing festively – i just can’t get it up this year. but i’ll still be out wandering around cuz i just love the feeling of owning the streets on mardi gras day.
on the creative front, i’ve been really distracted lately with my new button maker. i’ve been making ICE OUT and FUCK ICE buttons, giving a few out here and there and taking orders for quantities from friends. i made some WAKE UP buttons that look cute too and i’m thinking of doing some more of my old designs as buttons, whatever i can get away with on colored paper printed out on my laser printer at home. (i don’t currently have a color printer so i have to do everything DIY punk rock style for now!)
art-wise, i haven’t been doing a thing. well, until february started. i hadn’t been in the studio working on anything in months aside from tinkering with some lino blocks that didn’t work out. but then i saw that nick from art2life was doing a month-long challenge focused on just getting folks in motion, painting. i instantly realized that was exactly what i needed to get me back into the groove of working in my studio regularly, if even just for 20 minutes at a time each day. it’s called the creative awakening challenge. i am less looking for “awakening” than i am a kick in the pants. for me maybe it’s a creative remembering. lol
i started off great the first 4 days but then i had a day when i just didn’t make the time to paint. i tried to make it up the next day but then i felt “behind” and so at this point i’ve just decided to try my best to do something whenever i have time and i’m no longer logging whether i do or not, not counting what day of the challenge it is. i’m not trying for perfection here or a participation medal. i just wanted to use this challenge as a way to get me back into my groove. and in general, i do think it’s working.
i’ll post some pics of my pages so far. nick suggested we do a 2 page spread in our journal for these so i have done that except for yesterday i used a 12×12″ canvas for some odd reason. i like how it turned out.
it’s feb 13th today and i only have one other spread that i did that is not pictured so i haven’t been great about every day but it’s definitely progress to have painted at all. when this ends, art2life will be doing another free workshop called the creative visionary blueprint – i think it starts on march 2nd – which feeds into the 10th anniversary of the creative visionary program. i’ve taken CVP twice now and will likely do it again this year cuz it’s just nice to have some structure to my painting time. and i’ll be doing the free workshop too. stay tuned for links on all that next week after mardi gras.
ok, well back to mardi gras for now and hopefully coming up with something to wear on tuesday. for those of you who celebrate, i hope you have a fun and safe mardi gras weekend! and for the rest of you, i wish you were here!