reality

suede 23

mandalas have a sort of rule: 

you start in the middle and go around, adding, and making it grow - that satifies and centers me. it gives me the freedom to make the same details over and over and around, leaving me to just come up with colors and a way to finish it off. it's like following the lines of a street. i stick to the edge, working one layer at a time. it gives me a way to channel my obsessive need to control. i like to make off-center mandalas like this, to allow a peak at the surrounding atmospheres....

suede 22 and 20

paisleys give me very small areas to fill. boundaries are all important in my drawings: outlines and limits. i believe this need is a fight against my brain trying to control me. i turn on it and try to show i'm stronger. :)

suede 18

i have loved sugar skulls since the first time i saw them, and think that drawing them has even made me fear death a little less. (well, that and my newfound freedom from religion, which partially came about as a rebirth of my love and adoration for science). funny thing, though, i thought i would be more grounded in reality...turns out my mind doesn't play well with reality....

 

calm.............

once in a while, i make a page that lands in my favorites file. that means i can't find enough mistakes in it to take away the calm it gives me. these are two of those. ♥

page 43, 44

 

 

 

i am really happy with the three above, somehow they worked better than i thought. i got some new blick markers from my best friend in ohio!!  (thanks, missy).  she picked some lighter colors, so i'm excited to use those to do something new or at least a little different. we'll see how that might work with some vintage or magazine images thrown in...

here are three ACEOs i used a bit of collage in:

the eye from a catalog, the two heads from a vintage encyclopedia.

 

 

...and some magic. think i'll stick to the collage thing...

 

i have failed to open my ETSY store on my birthday, may 4th.

i had a description put in, and i went to add my photos, but they were TOOBIG!

so, back to photoshop to chop.

starting to wonder if it's not worth it for the few dollars i'll make?

i have, however, started a FACEBOOK PAGE for art and art friends form flickr, blogs, etc. i hope to make that a place to discuss process and product and maybe turn this blog into a place for discussing and sharing depression and other mental health issues as it pertains to art. or the other way around. either direction, i completely believe in and depend on art as therapy, and want to share that with others who do the same or who didn't think about art as a healing process. there are 198765 things going on in our life right now, so working on this is helpful but will be slow going...i am keeping up with my flickr the most, since i am getting into the networking thing