October 15 Morning Practice
Well, I did it. Working both mornings of 14 and 15th, I left black and white ink behind and filled two pages with illustrated journaling and lots of color (posca pens). I used Michelle Allen’s color block and lettering styles, and then continued with my own subject matter and style. I used to fill sketchbook pages like this now and then and it was fun to come back to it.
I started with an insight I’d had recently that underneath all the things I think I might want in my life, my real goals are pretty simple: make friends, feel peace and excitement and connection in al the good ways that all link together like chain.
I illustrated a quote from a book I finished recently, Meditation for Mortals by Oliver Birkman, that really stuck with me. If life is like being thrown into a big mysterious sea as the philosopher __ Heidegger proposes, Birkman rightly observes, we’d all like to feel as if we’re “captains of a super yacht.” in full control. But in fact we are just paddling around on our little kayaks. So much of life is actually not in our control. I liked that analogy a lot.
I captured my poor grandson’s ambivalence about halloween. Almost two years old, Archie is coming across all kinds of halloween decorations out in the world that scare him. The other day he was on my lap and we were reading a halloween book together when he turned the page to see a Frankenstein figure. He puzzled over it for a moment and then looked up at me with a worried expression on his face, “Not spooky?” What a good question!
And finally, feeling gratitude for several friends and still fighting my own lack of confidence in drawing comic people, I tried my hand at drawing them. Not my style, I think, but a good exercise.
I decided that I really don’t like using Posca pens to fill large blocks of color. I should have broken out the paint brushes with goauche. To draw it out first before paint, I’m thinking I could do something like this in rough colored pencil and then go over it with goauche and ink. That might be more fun to do—and I’ll have many more color choices too.
October 4 Morning Practice
Today I took the theme of “windows” and ran with it. Just let myself doodle, basically. An altogether quick morning page. Worked on varying line weights and values while still staying monochrome.
I’m coming to the end of this sketchbook and I’m wondering what I want to do going forward. I’ve been focusing on black and white ink because 1) I love the bold contrast of black and white and I love using ink pens, and 2) drawing with pens is probably the easiest way to make art (especially when traveling). But I find myself yearning for color and other mediums.
Lately, I’ve been admiring several other artists who create visual diaries—Amandaworks with her wild expressive and colorful mixed media daily pages, Kevin Mercer’ and Marc David Spengler’s shape-driven collage journals…collage is definitely calling me back. Jane Davies shared a collage artist this week, Ashley Mary, whose work I loved…and then also Michelle Allen has some visual journal pages in either/and ink and paint in her instagram feed call that me too. (I’m not bothering to provide links because as a digital journal on my own website I’m not expecting too many people to stumble here—but if you do, you can find the above artists on instagram or pinterest or a quick browser search.)
Not sure where I’m going next, creatively, but I do know that I want to continue doing morning pages and most likely I’ll switch up the media. I also have to make a decision about whether to bring this digital journal project out into the world on those other platforms. We’ll see.
It’s been all black and white drawing this month and I do like this group of morning
October 13 Morning Page
One of the best things I do are early morning outdoor workouts three days a week with a lovely bootcamp group. Recently we moved from a fully landscaped park to open space near wetlands and I am so loving nature all around us.
Today was my first day back to bootcamp after our trip so maybe I had new eyes, or maybe it was the light between all the clouds not gathered yet for rain, but it was a truly beautiful morning.