Look Out Now or Flying Girl Makes It Through The Storm

Look Out Now, or Flying Girl Makes It Through The Storm
Pencil, Ink and Acrylic paint on vintage Alice in Wonderland book page
7 1/4" x 4 3/4" on 8 1/2"x 11"

This is my first flying girl in quite some time.

I'm not sure what the lesson here is, unless it's about learning how to breathe again after being buffeted about by the winds of fate.

Or perhaps remembering the lessons that I have already learned.

Or perhaps life is guaranteed to knock you around a bit, but if you manage to come out the other side, it is a lesson, not the doom that it felt like when you were caught in the middle of it.

That sounds suspiciously like "this too shall pass," but that's ok since that's one of my favorite old sayings.

Maybe the wisdom of getting older is learning to hunker down and wait it out, and understanding that there is  always going to be something better on the other side. Time goes faster than we think and we are stronger than we know.

Maybe this is just a reminder. It gets better. We get stronger.

Prints of this painting is for sale here:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/122841807/look-out-now-or-flying-girl-makes-it

There Are No Failures, Not Even This One

Yesterday, I had the sudden urge to carve myself a new shop stamp.

I love all things handmade, and enjoy the thought of doing it myself.

I took my old stamp and inked it onto the new stamp carving material. You see, you have to do the carving in reverse in order to make it work out right when you stamp on paper.

Did any of you catch my mistake?

Oh yeah.

I out clevered myself. Using the old stamp as my outline, I had reversed the reverse and thus when I stamped, it was all wrong.

Unless of course, you hold the paper up to the sun and look through it. Ah. There's my nice stamp.

I really like the hand carved, hand written quality of it. It's what I do, make things by hand, right?

Pardon my issues with things like left and right, reversals, and negatives and positives. It shows up with arithmetic and numbers and even letters sometimes.  It actually turns out that I have a learning disability that I never knew about until I was a grown up. It's called dyscalculia and is like dyslexia with numbers. I can usually logic my way through things, but every so often, my problems come out. Sometimes I wonder if my life would have been different if I'd known about this learning disability. I did pretty well in school, mostly by trying to stay as far away as possible from math, but what if I'd had learning strategies? What if I knew why I could never remember how to figure out the math problems at home, even if I'd understood them in school. Who knows what I would have been doing now if I hadn't spent my formative years avoiding math?

Oh, don't worry, I turned my mistake around, literally, and used the backwards stamp to stamp a NEW block of carving material, and this time, when I carved it, it was in the CORRECT direction.

I used it to stamp some cute new little bookmarks for my shop.

This brings me to my lesson for the day.

There are no failures.

There are just steps we take on our journey.

It could all be falling down around your ears, but if you keep going, if you fight your way through, and come out the other side, everything that fell down before becomes something to help you climb higher. Every mistake you make, every flaw you possess leads you to the positive outcomes of your life. Every struggle you fight through, even if you lose, makes you stronger for your next endeavor... which might not be a fight at all, which might be made easier, which might even be a pleasure, because of all the hard lessons you learned in your failures.

The stamp carving went smoothly. I already knew it would work. And I solved the problems of the previous attempt, and I was confident in my abilities, so the tension of tiny work was not there. It went faster and more smoothly.

And voila. I have my stamp. It took a little longer than I wanted, but sometimes that's just the way life is. There are bumps and detours on our life journey.

Maybe it just makes us ready when we get to our destination.

Head of a Girl from the Past, and Changing

Head of a Girl from the Past
ink on moleskine


I have lost count of what number "head of a girl" this is. I've decided to go with names form now on, rather than numbers. What started out as an exercise to see what I could do with ink wash portraits has begun to take on meaning on its own, it's begun to become something of its own.

I suppose that's the nature of a series. It serves as a way for you to grow. You keep going back to the same theme or technique and you develop it with each following piece.

I don't know where this series will go. It's led me back to portraits, which I've always enjoyed, so that's good, and also drawing from references again, instead of making things up wholesale in my head. That's not a bad thing either.

In this season of beginning of the year resolutions I've been thinking about change a lot.

I think sometimes we expect to be able to change, just like that, make a resolution and that's it, quit cigarettes, lose weight, get published, go back to school... whatever the goal. But I don't think that change, real change really works like that.

Change doesn't happen all at once, it happens in stages and baby steps. Change is more like growth, or evolution. Change is something that happens inside of you first, that makes you want to take that small step, and the small step is what helps you get to the next choice, and making that choice convinces you that this is where you want to go.

Maybe change begins with an idea, "I can do that..." or "I don't have to be this..." A possibility. An idea. A realization that the dream is possible, an opening of doors, a willingness to take a chance, a first step out on that long journey, the beginning attempts at an exercise, even if they fail at first, and the commitment to keep trying, even though it doesn't seem like you will ever see that desired, whole-sale change or growth.

Maybe life is all about change. We have the illusion that things won't change or we will always be where and what we are, but the truth is, nothing stays the same and we are always in flux.

Perhaps part of our issues with making lasting change in our life is that we don't expect to fail in our attempts. We think that we make up our mind to change and that's it, it should be smooth sailing from then on in. But change is such a all encompassing thing, from the inside out, that it doesn't make sense that it would be all that easy.

There are going to be set backs. There are going to be moments where you are just not living up to your high ideals. There are going to be moments when you are scared and don't think you can do it. There are going to be moments where the old fears and bad feelings rise up again. There are going to be external difficulties, time constraints, people who don't support us, physical difficulties, unexpected disasters, whatever.

But in our journey to truly change, to GROW and develop and transform, we have to trust that the path we've set out on is the right one. And if it isn't as easy as we thought, we are still moving forward, despite stumbles or road blocks or detours. Sometimes, our journey might lead us into places we didn't expect, places we didn't dare hope for. Sometimes we might find we have to rest on our journey, or stop not quite at the end, or re-evaluate our destination.

Keep going. Don't give up. Expect set backs. Trust yourself. Trust the process.

Change is hard. Growth is hard. Life is hard.  Yup. So we might as well just keep going through.

Hush or Keeping It Inside

Hush, or Alice Keeps It Inside
4 3/4 x 7 1/2"
ink and acrylic on vintage Alice in Wonderland book page

I've taken a little blog break. You see, I've had a lot going on.

I know I was blogging last year when I was in the midst of a move and I was blogging all my art from my 100 days challenge but I think that I had a moment to stop and think about where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do... and in order to think about that with my blog, I had to stop.

What I've thought about doing lately is making my blog more intentional, and I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to do it yet.

Sometimes there is virtue in being quiet.

In quiet, we can start listening to our internal voices, and these voices can whisper very silently sometimes. We have to stop talking, stop declaring ourselves, stop shouting to the world, just so that we can hear the whispers of intuition, emotion, idea, belief, desire, fear, hope, story, inspiration.

I know that it can be hard to be quiet and still, to not jump right in to actions or decisions. Sometimes, when you get that initial idea, it can be so exciting that you want to race to the finish line and go all in.

But the truth is, very often, the initial idea, or even not so initial, needs care and silence and darkness in order to grow to fruition. I've seen it with story ideas, for sure. I get a great idea and I want to start writing, but something in me tells me to hold on, let the idea germinate, let it grow and become stronger, let it feed on different thoughts and experiences, mull it over in the darkness. I sit with it deliberately, jot down a few notes, go to sleep with the idea in my head, throw in another intriguing concept, stir them up a bit and still... still hold on to it, silently.

There is no need to rush to speak it.

Not yet.

Hush. There is time to let it grow.

The Evolution of a Doll, Creating Yourself

 Every day, I feel like I am creating myself. Who I am as a mother, as an artist, as a friend and partner and sister and daughter. Who I am as a thinker and a doer.

It's an evolution not unlike creating... art, crafts, food, novels, business plans, outfits, papers... whatever.

Dolls.

Like this here doll I made my daughter for Christmas.

Here she is, nothing but a sketched out pattern and some upcycled t-shirt material.  I took my scissors to it and cut away everything that she was not.

Leaving her with a basic, disassembled, empty shape.

 In this scene, my doll has been sewn up and filled with stuffing. I've begun to MAKE her, to take the ideas of her and put her into reality, give her form and shape. She's a doll now. Anyone could look at her and say, that's a doll. (Here she's sitting next to another gift, unformed, which turned out to be a pink kitty.)

You see the thing is, nothing we create will ever get to BE anything until we actually start, until we put it through that sewing machine, and take it all the way, see what happens with all that machinery and sharp pointy things and fears of what might go wrong or how the machine might break down (mine did) or how we might forget how to use the mighty machinery (I didn't) or maybe my doll might not look like what I wanted her to look like (she didn't really look like what I imagined at all, she became her own thing.) You just have to do it. Put yourself out there and say, YES, I will do this thing.

Once you have the basic shape of your doll, that's when you can start putting your personality into her. That's when you can start giving her the colors, trying out different ways of making her look. Here, I'm giving a go to see how the different colored felt pieces might make her look, trying out some placements for her cheeks and eyes and lips and hair. This was not the first combination I tried. I held up different colors, cut out many little circles, tried different shapes and sizes. And this was not the first time I'd made this kind of doll face, either, she is just another variation on work that I've already done.

 Here I have committed to my choices. I've gone and pinned them down. Made them real and permanent. There's no more changing my mind on the color of eyes or lips. Again, did she turn out like I thought she would? Not quite. But in the sewing, in the doing, she became her own thing, not just an idea, but a doll. This doll.

 Then I tried some of the stuff I'd never tried before. Always in the past, I'd made hair with yarn or embroidery floss, but this time I knew I wanted to try felt. How would it work? I didn't know. It was an experiment, something new to try, a risk. And I gave it a shot.

 Here she is with face and hair, after all my giving it a go and planning and making my ideas come real and trying out different variations and committing to my choices and stitching it all down and making it real.

She's a doll.

 I like her.

Originally, she was inspired by two things... the scrap fabric I had, aka brown t-shirt, and the vintage doll dress. I made the original pattern so that she would fit into this dress. After that, I allowed myself to be inspired by the various dolls I have seen and loved and by what I had already done with doll making. I mean, this is why you have a daughter, right? To make girly stuff for them?

It doesn't matter that she didn't like the yellow dress on this doll and made me make her a pink dress out of scrap fabric, right?  Or that she'll probably change the scrap pink dress, even though she designed it, and put her in a different vintage doll dress.

What matters is I went all the way in and trusted my abilities and my judgment and gave it a go. What matters is I took it to the end of the journey and didn't give up. What matters is I made it. I thought of it, dreamed it, planned it, trouble shot it, detailed it, put it all together and then put it out into the world, I mean, gave it to a five year old.

Make a doll. Make a craft. Make a painting. Make a novel. Make a home. Make a business. Make a life. Create yourself. Those things are not you, and yet, the making of them makes you.

What are you making?

Head of a Girl 14 or Marilyn in Rose and Dreaming

Head of a Girl 14, or Marilyn in Rose
ink wash on watercolor paper
4.5" x 6"
1/6/13

I've been thinking about dreams lately... not the close your eyes at night kind, the big kind, the kind that get you up in the morning and get you moving. The kind where you envision a life that you'd love living. The kind that are about goals and wishes. Those kind of dreams.

Marilyn Monroe was a dreamer. She put herself out there and she was hurt. She never stopped being vulnerable and I think she achieved her dreams... although perhaps sometimes those dreams ended up being painful and sometimes she had to sacrifice for them and she definitely experienced loss in their pursuit.

When you commit to your dreams... what happens?

When you take steps to achieve your dearest goals... how does your life change?

When you accept that this is the risk you are willing to take and this is the cliff you are willing to leap from... how do you learn how to fly?

btw Marilyn is for sale in my etsy shop
https://www.etsy.com/listing/119788654/head-of-a-girl-14-marilyn-in-rose-ooak

Girl of Freaks: a novel of not werewolves (pending)

Girl Of Freaks: a novel of not werewolves by Rowena Murillo (cover mock up)
ink, acrylic and pencil on paper

This year, I am going to do my damnedest to get my novel published. It's ready, now it's just up to me to put it out there.

When I told Jen Lemen of this goal, she gave me an assignment to create a mock up of my novel cover.

Immediately, the impulse is for me to say, "no, that's not what I had planned for the day," but considering that I say "no" too often, and my word for the year is...

yes
sharpie, tape residue, and "vintage" foam core board.

..."YES" it was time for me to try the challenge. I took out my ink and my journal and searched for a likely photo reference (my first instinct was to use one of myself, but I really didn't want to paint myself for my book cover as the mc is not me) and got going.

This is what I did. Of course, when I get published, this will not by the cover. I'm not even sure it's the best cover for the book, but putting it out there, visualizing it, making it a real thing helps me to focus on my goals.

Thank you Jen for the good assignment and giving me a leaping off point for the rest of my year.

Abundance and 96-100 in the 100 days creative challenge,

 Branched
gold acrylic paint and pen on paper
96/100

Yesterday was my 100th day of my 100 creative works in 100 days challenge.

Woo hoo.

I actually did it. I didn't even cheat. I missed two months of painting and drawing because of my move, but I was able to get my grove back and restart my creativity. Maybe it's a good idea that I did commit to finishing this task, against the odds, because it meant my creativity didn't get lost in the many duties of moving. And life. Don't forget life.

This is a painting of a branch. In gold. I had extra gold paint on my palette from painting another picture, so i wanted to use the last of it, and I've always loved those twisty branches, so... No special meaning behind it.

Monster Plans
watercolor, pencil, pen on paper
97/100

These are plans for a horde of monsters I am going to make my son for Christmas. A kraken looks an awful lot like an octopus, and godzilla looks an awful lot like a T-rex. Interesting. The plan here is to use felt and cotton knit and buttons and embroidery floss.

I need to do less planning and more sewing though.

 this bowl is full of abundance
pencil, water color, ink wash and acrylic on paper
98/100

This is another empty/full bowl. This one  I designed with gold leaves and pomegranates to symbolize abundance. The bowl is marked with hatches, which to me always represents time. The background is a dark, deep brown, like fertile earth.

An incomplete symbology

ink and watercolor on paper

99/100

Speaking of symbols, here I drew out my own study sheet. I was just thinking about some of the symbols I seem to use over and over again. Sometimes when I paint, it's a kind of language, I paint stories... or parts of stories, and the symbols are part of the meaning making. 

Too many years reading and writing poetry. :)

Miniature doll in progress
paper clay, silver wire
100/100

And for my 100th work of art, I am posting a paperclay doll that I started. She's not done in the slightest, but I don't feel bad about using a WIP for my last entry. It's a new challenge for me and I have been wanting to try it for ages. Plus, I think it looks kind of cool unfinished, just the white paper clay and the silver wire.

It was even better before I dropped it while the clay was still damp and it landed face down on the floor. She got a little smooshed. Oops. I tried to fix her the best I could. I think when she's dry all the way, the paint will go a long way to making her look better. What I've seen of the tiny dolls people make, they don't have to have all the details in the clay. You can just give suggestions of the features, then when you paint her face, she gets her personality.

I intend to give her hands and feet attached to the wire, then wrap the exposed wire with florist tape, then make tiny clothes out of fabric. I do not know who she will be. She might be a woman from the 30s or 40s... as I think about the hair style that I kind of molded a bit already. We shall see. Whatever she develops into, that's part of the fun.

And I guess that's why I picked this piece for my last entry, instead of another piece that I completed... because where I'm going in my creativity is still unwritten.

I think I've entered some territory that is new to me, and have developed some techniques and ideas that are rather interesting. That's one of the best things about doing this challenge, watching how you develop as you go. It's such an extended project, one of small babysteps, that you can actually see the journey you make and you can see how one thing leads to the next.

And so now I'm done and I can relax on the posting, but I do hope that I can continue with my art work and see where it takes me next.

I do recommend this as a challenge for anyone. It is a challenging journey, but if you keep your daily goals small enough, it is not impossible. You'll notice that whenever I got behind in my count, my art work would get smaller and simpler, and that's okay, it still moves you forward. If 100 days is too long a challenge, you can do a month of art works, or  43 days. Or whatever number suits your life. It's committing to the creating that makes it worthwhile.

Re-Vision and the Past 93-95/100

 re-vision
acrylic on paper
93/100

I spent all morning and afternoon painting yesterday and then ran out of time to post. I am slowly catching up to my 100 works in 100 days goal. Of course, I've been neglecting other things. Well, life is about sacrifices isn't it?

I feel like today's post shows a departure for me. I'm not quite sure where it's going. Maybe it is more intentional and less improvisational. I'm okay with that, although it takes a lot longer to do. Thus all day painting and running out of time.

I did start with a symbol, the eye, one that has been a common refrain through out my artistic life. Mostly doodled on notebooks when I was a kid. I read somewhere that it was something about "being seen." I don't know. Maybe that's go something to do with where my head is at nowadays.

I know when I got intentional with it, I began to think about what I KNOW my life is about nowadays, and that is reviewing my life, my work and my goals, and revising and re-visioning it all. I kind of like that I am taking symbols from the past and rethinking them again. Or art supplies from the past and seeing what I can do with them. Or vintage photos from the past and recreating them from my perspective. (I found piles of photo albums from my own family, my ancestors. I should really try to incorporate them.)

this bowl is full of hope
acrylic and graphite on paper
94/100

I saw an illustration of a bowl somewhere and since then, I have been slightly obsessed with the symbolism of the bowl.

It is an empty receptacle. It holds whatever it is you put in it. It is also used to hold offerings, to other people, to the gods, to yourself. You can not fill the bowl unless it starts out empty. The emptiness of the bowl is what allows it to hold the gift, the sustenance.

I drew it in pencil and painted half of it. It is not unfinished. That was intentional. There's something about the bare bones of pencil drawing that I like. As if it is being created. It is also without color. It is work a day, functional, not really meant to be shown. It is what belongs underneath the surface.

I also wanted to show the marking lines for the words. This bowl is laid down to it's essence, this is what it is made of.

The inside of the bowl is the color of a spring sky. Hope. The outside is a pattern of pencil circles that remind me of stones.

The background is half painted with the swirls, kind of reminiscent of steam, or vines. Something growing, something rising. I painted it with titan buff, because I wanted it to still be white, but a white with color, as if it was hope alone that changed the plain white paper of the table to the color.

head of a girl 13 (tori amos)
ink wash on paper
95/100

I saw a High School picture of Tori Amos, and although she was not "quite" as vintage as the other photo sources I've been using, there was something about the loveliness, the imperfections, the romantic curly hair, the youth and hope of a girl who would become something powerful and darker as she grew... I just wanted to paint it.

And I wanted it to be pink and girly and dreamy.

She doesn't really look like her, but I wasn't really trying to make her look like Tori Amos. It was the feel that got me and the feel I was trying to convey. I thought a too-close portrait of Tori would be distracting.

Well that's what I did yesterday. Hopefully I will be able to paint some more today so I can keep my momentum going. I have four more days of my self imposed challenge, and only five more pieces to do.

I CAN DO IT!

But Wait, There's More, 85-92/100

 There's a light
acrylic and gel pen on paper
85/100

Spent yesterday and this morning trying some stuff. I had this page of dark blue, awaiting something or other. I think I managed something or other.

Be Present
acrylic on paper
86/100

Then I thought I'd try painting a bit of something around me. Sometimes, when I don't know what to paint, I remember that I can look outside of me and paint something in the real world, not just in my imagination.

But I added some imagination anyway. Scallops take a long time to paint, did you know that? They take a bit of attention. Sometimes painting almost feels like meditation.

Green Hand
acrylic on paper
87/100

 More scallops. Smaller. More attention. More hands.

Blue Chair
acrylic on paper
88/100

 Back to real life. Sometimes I like to practice my visual acuity, paint what I see. This turned out pretty well except I did not judge my paper very well and the chair ran off the edge of the page. :( Oh well. That's part of what you do when you paint. Composition. Maybe I'll try painting this lovely antique desk chair again, and this time have it stay on the page. I did like how I managed the cane back, though. And the dark and light of the shadows, that was nice. I love to watch the paint bleed into the water, I like the spontaneity it gives. It's lively.

one step at a time
acrylic on paper
89/100

One of the things I do when I paint is try to use all of my paint. I had a whole bunch on my palette, was I supposed to let it dry up and go on to the rest of my day?  I refused. Still didn't know what to paint though, so I wrote myself a message.

Upon retrospect, I think I should have tried the chair again, just to see what came of it.

but wait there's more
acrylic on paper
90/100

Maybe this is because of the extra paint I was still trying to get rid of.  Or maybe it's a message. Transitions are hard. Very often they feel like endings, deaths, losses. But there's always something beginning, being born, and gained. Kind of like that whole Aztec calendar thing. The world might end. Then it will begin again.

 Revel
acrylic on paper
91/100

Or maybe because there was actually more painting coming. I'm feeling the scallops, and decided to go back to some past imagery from my 100 days. The silhouette.

Aloft
acrylic on paper
92/100

And here was a tiny sketch that I started and never managed to finish. So I went back and painted it in and gave it some scallops, because why not? and I was feeling the scallops. It took most of the morning to do a lot of these paintings, although a couple of them were finished last night.

I am working hard on catching up. I have 4 more days and 8 more pieces to go. Almost there. I'd love to get back to the place where I can just post one piece a day. And I need to get started on Christmas, too. Phew.

Well like the drawing said, but wait, there's more. There's always more.