Not-Art 37-45

 

Day 37. Paper, rollerball ink, old stamp from envelope.

 

Day 38. 'Constellation'. Marker, rollerball ink. I just drew a random pattern of dots, not thinking at all, then randomly connected them and it ended up looking like a constellation. I always liked making up my own better than trying (and failing) to find them.

 

Day 39. 'Test'. Paper, rollerball ink, marker.
Because I am more than what fits in the box, more than numbers and letters could ever say.

 

Day 40. Paper, marker.

 

Day 41. Block printing ink. This stuff isn't meant to be used as paint, but I did anyway. Took several days to dry.

 Day 42. Paper, rollerball ink, glitter, white glue, block printing ink.
I think I used some paper from the inside of a bill envelope.

 

Day 43. Paper, block printing ink, marker.

 

Day 44. 'You Don't Need TWO Ears!' Marker, acrylic paint.
My near-obssession with Labyrinth continues. I am quite fond of the pyromaniac Chilly Down stoner monkeys with their various removable limbs and innocent yet nightmarish games. My favourite part is when one disembodied head follows Sarah as she climbs up a wall, insisting 'What about your ears? You don't need TWO ears!'. So I painted a chaos of orange, red and pink tones like the monkeys, dotted with pairs of eyes and a stray tail.

 

Day 45. Paper, oil pastel. I think the curtain is coming up on the sun, with a blue handkerchief in the foreground. Or something. There's a reason I call this stuff not-art.

Catching up on Not-Art

 

Day 25. Collage, paper, rollerball pen, marker. This is one of my favourites, and somewhat closer to my definition of art. The paper scraps are cut up bits of old lists and things I wrote.

 

Day 26. Marker. I'd been watching Labyrinth that day (no, nobody give me any funny looks, there's more to the movie than David Bowie as the goblin king) so you can sort of see the spirals and angles as 'walls' complete with openings.

 

Day 27. Colored pencil and oil pastel.

 

Day 28. Oil pastel. Vaguely inspired by African mud cloth.

 

Day 29. Acrylic paint. I meant for this to be mostly blue but other colors insisted on getting involved.

 

Day 30. I started out angry, thus the base of varied reds. Got happier as I painted, thus the orange, pink and burgundy. Added bits of green for color theory.

 

Day 31. Marker and rollerball. Made this during Monty Python.

 

Day 32. Liquid shimmer, eyeshadow, eyeliner and lipstick.

 

Day 33. Silk, marker. I call it 'Jerusalem' because I made this during yet more Monty Python, and man do those guys have some kind of obsession with the song.

 

Day 34. Bronze rocket paint, acrylic paint.

Not-Art 15-19 and an announcement!

Announcement first, as I'm too excited to wait--I've opened a second store! Now you can get shimmerstone jewelry from my Etsy shop AND my new shop on Artfire! http://www.artfire.com/users/BrightCircle

In celebration, the first customer at my Artfire will receive a free pair of earrings with their purchase!

Number 15. Conte crayon.Trying my hand at sketching a postcard of a beautiful woman with flowing hair, done by local artist Gabriel Pons. Well, his postcard was of a beautiful Asian woman. This one ended up a lopsided Asian girl (sorry Gabriel! I promise I'm not trying to sell this!). I'm far more comfortable with abstracts than I am with sketching, which is why I occasionally sketch--to get out of my comfort zone. I just tried to sketch what I saw, not what I thought I knew, and as a result, the mouth is fairly good for someone at my level.

Number 16. Acrylic paint. Inspired by a magazine clipping of a city block glowing neon at night, with a golden building as the focal point.

Number 17. Acrylic paint. Inspired by the show Fringe, with its dichotomy and twin realities, one represented by blue, the other by red, each with elements of the other mixed in, and a blurry dividing line. Everybody, tune your TVs/DVRs to Friday nights, and let's keep Fringe on the air!

Number 18. Acrylic paint. Inspired by an ad for, believe it or not, Skyy vodka. The ad was a startling image of glossy red boots, and a cobalt blue bottle against a bright yellow background

Number 19, today's painting. As you may have guessed by now, acrylic paint yet again. I really like the paints, the saturated colors, and how well they cover the drab beige of the original chipboard. Perhaps I will grow to love the other media as much when I have a white canvas to work on. Or, white chipboard. This was inspired by the cover of the album 'Wake Up And Smell The Coffee' by Irish band the Cranberries, most known for 'Dreams', 'Zombie', 'Linger', and 'Ridiculous Thoughts'.

Non-art Daily 12-14

 

Acrylic paint, consciously experimenting with color complements--multiple shades of blue paired with a smidge of orange, on a pale yellow background and an edging of lime green.

 

Acrylic paint. I started with a white background, added a wide stripe of maroon and decided that pink would go nicely, as would golden yellow.

 

Marker and, experimenting with different materials, a bit of blue eyeshadow.  Somebody made fun of some lyrics to a song they knew was special to me, just because they didn't like the band. I think that's very uncool. Hating on a band is one thing, dissing lyrics you KNOW means a lot to someone else--that's different. I don't go around dissing song lyrics special to them, no matter how respected or scorned THEIR favourite band is. The band in question is Hanson, and that's their symbol on the left. I was, for lack of a better word, inspired to write 'NO ONE' on the right. I'm not sure what it means. But it has to do with my feelings of how it's not cool to make fun of people's special songs.

Non-Art Daily projects 1-3

I've made peace with the contrast in my skills at drawing and painting, and my desire to use art supplies. Who cares about my skill level, I'm going to have fun with paints and conte crayons and pastels and coloured pencils and graphite sticks and what-have-you! This will also be a good opportunity to learn more about how colour works.
I have a set of business-card-sized particle boards, and I have decided to produce one piece of not-art per day, and blog about it.
My first piece was inspired by a visit to a local art exhibition featuring bright colours, childlike shapes and a cheery feel. Here is a postcard of the exhibition:


Here is my first piece of non-art, done in acrylic paint, photographed on a piece of blank particle board. I wasn't sure what to do with paintbrushes (dip them in water to keep them clean?) so I just used my fingers and a makeshift palette instead. I used a lime green background, with dots of white like in the postcard, but went my own way the rest of the way. I put a red blotch in the lower left corner, an orange squiggle above it, and added some dark, low-value aubergine dots.

The second Non-Art piece was inspired by a magazine ad for FusionBeads company, using a lot of black, gray, white and oranges.

Here is what I made. Using what I think are conte crayons, I started with the same graceful lines and circles, but inevitably  branched out, using intense blues to complement the orange tones.

Yesterday's Non-Art Daily is representative, or tries to be. :D I had a few hours to spend in Old Town, so I walked about the streets, exploring little shops: some filled with Christmas things, some with art, crafts and accessories from exotic lands, and some with good solid food--just my kind of afternoon. One such shop had a side door opening onto a little alleyway with tables, and yellow lights strung overhead (the yellow didn't show up very well), and it's that alleyway I attempted to draw, again in conte crayon. I sat down at one of the tables (I could only fit one into the drawing) and made notes of the colours I saw, and an even more primitive sketch of the approximate layout.

Nobody try to make me feel better about my abilities; I already feel fine. :) It's very freeing to let go of the pressure to 'be good'. This Non-Art project isn't about being good or even halfway-decent. It's about having fun, and I'm doing just that!

This is the month I'm just going to USE MY BEADS

You know the feeling--you see beads, you HAVE to have them, but you're not sure what you'll use them for. It doesn't matter, it FEELS right to buy them and so you do. And the beads sit in your bead stash, waiting for 'that perfect project' to be used. Nothing but the best will do for those beads, no sir.

Or perhaps you buy the beads with a design in mind, but when you sit down to make the design, it doesn't come out the way you thought, so you unstring the half-finished necklace and put your beads away, waiting for the next strike of inspiration.

Months pass, perhaps even years, and all the while you're accumulating more and more beads, faster than you're using them. Before you know it, your bead stash is out of control and your creativity is suffering from second-guessing design decisions as you try to make every single necklace, bracelet, or pair of earrings a museum-worthy masterpiece of form, function and creative vision!

You can't live like that. Can't design like that. The 'great' traditional artists we all know didn't live like that (at least, not all of them); they made little 'throwaway' sketches or 'boring' drawings that didn't quite turn out. And it was ok.
Great artists know that just as they have great art inside them, they have a lot of boring/'bad' art.

What should we take away from this? That we MUST let the less-than-museum-worthy art out of ourselves right alongside the great designs that keep us up until 1:23 am. Trying to keep every non-great design suppressed will only lead to a creativity traffic jam.

It took me a long time to understand this and let my simpler designs take form, but this month, I'm going to do it! I will use up those beads in my drawer in nice-looking jewelry, but I will not pressure myself into making every single piece a show-stopper! At the end of the month I will have a creative collection of classy jewelry, more toned-down than my usual style, but still bearing my unique vision. Because if I make it and design it--it has part of me in it, and isn't self-expression what art is all about?

Featured Artist: MicheleMaule

Visit Michele Maule's Etsy for fun, quirky vintage-inspired paintings and art prints. I like this one of the little blue typewriter. http://bit.ly/3bMzz

Michele the artist says: "I enjoy a good cup of coffee, a nice pint of beer, and laughing until my sides ache. a good hug from a good friend makes my day.
I have been making art for over ten years and have a bachelor's degree in art from Portland State University. My specialty is printmaking and collage, but I also love to paint and book bind."

Visit her shop at http://michelemaule.etsy.com

Featured Artist: DavidHinchenDesign

DavidHinchenDesign specializes in art portraits of city buildings. I LOVE city portraiture, so this is right up my alley. Pun genuinely not intended!

David says: "My drawings and paintings celebrate the visually absorbing shapes, colors, textures and eccentric details of the urban landscape. For many years, I worked solely in pen and ink. Slowly, I introduced color and have since developed a completely original technique which is characterized by precise ink images with acrylic tones painted over each other, resembling thin semi-opaque layers.
I'm a full-time artist who has completed over twenty years worth of drawings and paintings. The majority of my work portrays historic views of New York, New England and beyond."


My favourite is this painting print of Albany NY's State St. http://bit.ly/K3Sx4
What are you waiting for? Your place has been wanting a birthday present, so go buy it something!

Visit his shop at http://davidhinchendesign.etsy.com/
You can also find him at:

http://portraitsofhouseandhome.blogspot.com/

http://www.davidhinchenshouses.com/

http://david-hinchen.fineartamerica.com/

Featured Artist: PalmFrondArtist

Each of PalmFrondArtist's one of a kind paintings are done on natural palm fronds!

Suzanne of PalmFrondArtist says: "I love to paint palm fronds because each has its own unique shape. When I see a blank palm frond I always imagine what it could be and then I create it. (Sort of like looking at the clouds.) The palm fronds I find are discarded yard trash and I love the idea of recycling them into art. So much fun!"

I like the expressive, Michelangelo-inspired 'Sybil' the best. http://bit.ly/4LBv7

Visit her shop at http://palmfrondartist.etsy.com

Featured Artist: Schin

Etsy artist Schin Loong's fabulous digital paintings pair sometimes-dark mythical elements with a deceptively bright, breezy aesthetic. 

She says: ''I love bad puns, the worse, the better. My guilty pleasure is listening to bad pop music. I enjoy looking at pictures of baby animals, especially ducklings. I go out of my way to step on crunchy, dry leaves. I drink a zillion mugs of milk tea a day. I love all kinds of pretty things, and I hope my paintings will make your day a little prettier.''

I do love the impertinent goldfish in her 'My Mug' painting: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=23696983 


Visit her shop at http://schin.etsy.com
If you can't get enough of Schin (and who can?), you can also find her here: 
http://schin-art.com 
http://schin-art.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/schinloong