A Fresh Start

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A Fresh Start

During the collective pause while we burrowed into the longest nights of the year over the Winter Solstice (in the northern hemisphere), I did my share of reflecting and planning for the new year.

As did everyone else, it seems, on the interwebs.

I didn’t want to make resolutions or goals, as both dissolve and fade in the light of real life. And after completing a year-long, weekly project I didn’t want to box myself in with another one. But I thought I could using a guiding intention for my art practice. A navigational beacon for 2023 that would keep me sailing in a direction I want to go.

And the direction I want to head next is to experiment more, play with new materials in new combinations and generally wander outside my comfort zone.

I mean this as both a matter of spirit and craft. Through more intentional experimentation and play, I am as eager to learn more about my Self as a creative being as I am to improve my art skills.

I didn’t know where to start at first

So I began by

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Weekly Warm-ups - Abstract Collage

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Weekly Warm-ups - Abstract Collage

Last week I decided [daily warm ups) to restructure daily warm ups in my art practice to see if I can overcome the obstacle of, well, not doing it. While I know intellectually that warming up with simple practice exercises primes the well and adds important play and practice time, I avoided warm ups more often than not.

So last week I tried my new approach, which is to

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Daily warm-ups—a new to me approach

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Daily warm-ups—a new to me approach

One of the things I’m instituting in my art practice—or at least re-committing to—is a daily warm-up in my sketchbook (practice and play). The problem I’ve come up against before when I try to open with a daily warm-up is that I skip it.

The blank page looms, I don’t know what I want to do that day—so I don’t. I either have other art projects in progress or I have an idea for some final piece, and I launch into those instead.

But practice and play for no other reason than to practice and/or play is an important part of an art practice, i know that, both for building skills and discovering new ideas. Not to mention fun.

So I think I have the answer. I’m going to

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(Re)Discovering Copic Markers

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Long ago I admired a friend’s art and she used what Copic markers. So I went out and bought a few of my own—like maybe 20 over a few months.

I didn’t know much about alcohol markers—or the differences in kinds of ink at all—so and I’m sorry to say I didn’t really learn more. All I could see was that they came out really splotchy when I tried to draw with them on drawing paper and that I would need far more than 20 colors if I wanted to create anything interesting—and they were expensive. Didn’t seem worth it to me.

It didn’t take long to pretty much abandoned my small collection of Copic markers and focus on creating with other materials.

Fast forward to the present. I’m a bit further along on my art journey, having fallen much further down the drawing rabbit hole since then. One day recently, I started playing with those old Copic markers in my sketchbook. I was pleased to find that 10 years later they still worked as if new (turns out their caps are air proof), and I instantly became intrigued with the way they layered color.

The more I played, the more first realized that I did in fact need more colors! So I added to my collection just a bit. And then, I began to discover the possibilities.

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