Comfortable Shoes Studio

30 in June

If you are interested in joining in with me for the 30 in June Challenge, here's an image you can post on your blog or blog post:

And here is the code for blog loading:

<a title="30 in June by lessherger, on Flickr" href="http://comfortableshoesstudio.com"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7407/8901630644_ee3c7a087d_n.jpg" alt="30 in June" width="168" height="223" /></a>

Just copy and paste the red text!

Let's bust out of our journaling habits and try some new things!

 

Read about it here and here.

The First Day of Real Work

Today starts my self-employment. I’m forcing  myself to take a week to relax before I dive head long into the work of the site and writing. I know that by the end of the week I’ll be working hence the forced relaxation period. This weekend C and I watched some crap TV shows and cooked. It was great.

I started some random art journaling last night by culling through my pile of personal ephemera. I picked stuff out and glued it to the page. No rhyme or reason, but where it called to be glued. Where it looked good to me. A simple concept but one where I had to let myself be random and not plan out the page.

After that I wanted to clean off one of my watercolor palettes so I wet the colors and used a big brush to slather colors onto my pages. Again I wasn’t calculated or planned about where and what colors I used. I simply looked at what colors I had and what looked good on a page, then slathered the colors onto the page. I mixed colors on the page, worked wet-into-wet, and layered the color on top of the ephemera. Some of the ephemera resisted the watercolor, some absorbed it like a sponge.

I’ll write on these pages and then add more color and collage over my words. It’s all process.

30 in June

A few months ago I came up with this plan, I called it 31 in May. It was a good plan to get me producing art on a daily basis and then requiring me to list it on etsy. When the plan hatched from my brain I assumed that my last few weeks of DayJob would be uneventful, sadly I was wrong. So 31 in May becomes 30 in June. I’ll need to come up with a new drawing for it, but there you have the idea in a nutshell.

The reasoning for it is that I’ve gotten out of my daily art journaling habit. I journal but not daily and I miss it and let’s face it, I need it. So the plan is that I work in my small coil bound Stillman and Birn Beta journal everyday for the month of June. When the page is finished to hold myself accountable I load that page to etsy. Each page will be a real journal page. Sometimes with writing, but not always. I’ll work this coil bound journal just like I’d work any other journal, keeping process to the front of my mind. Each page will get a blog post and possibly a video. (The video portion will be harder due to video editing constraints. Editing a video a day is way harder than it sounds.) Anyway, that’s the idea, thirty 5x7 inch pieces in June, all loaded up to etsy and my blog.

How I Cope

I get a pen or pencil and a sketchbook then draw.

It only helps me to cope, it doesn't do anything for anyone else.

I'm okay with that.

If you need to deal with these events, work in your art journal.

It helps.

The Second Piece

This is the second in a series of images exploring self-doubt.

This image started as the last with some journaling, written with a noodler’s Ahab flex nibbed fountain pen. I focused my writing on the self doubt surrounding the “big thing” that I have coming up*, hopefully in May. I also wrote about how the impending change is affecting my feelings around how people will perceive me. I worry that people will think that my work is inauthentic.

As I wrote I came to the conclusion that as long as my work is from the heart and my mind that the work will be authentic no matter the content or direction I explore.
I blurred the writing with water. I decided to be literal with my images and colored photocopies of a heart and brain with watercolors. When these were dry I cut them out and glued them to the page. I added layers of color around the 2 collaged pieces with colored pencils and watersoluble crayons.
I took one of my sheep stickers colored it black and stuck it in the middle of the brain. A rather literal representation of sheep brain. I also added a tea tag to the heart. I added a few more colors, picked out the yellow crayon to get the color a little more intense and added some white crayon between the blue rays.

The image measures 5x7 inches and is available on my etsy shop here.

A Little More on this Self Doubt Thing

A little more on this self-doubt thing.

I could trace it back and say that it’s because of this “big thing” i have dangling over my head, or I could trace it origins back to my Chipin campaign. It went well. I was way behind schedule due to a death in my family but it went well. But the whole thing, the whole time, I thought I was going to screw it up. I put myself out there and was well received. Through all of that I figured that I would in some way screw it up. I’d do something that would foul up the works. I’d screw up a piece of art, send one to the wrong address, or something else.

I finished everything and sent it on it’s merry way.

Still that nagging voice of self doubt, different from my inner critic said over and over, “This won’t work, you will fail.”

I think we all have that voice of self-doubt in our mind. Maybe it’s the inner critic, or the voice of a parent, a teacher or co-worker. Someone has given voice to our doubt, and that voice sticks in our mind. It plays on repeat, over and over and over again, until we figure out that the little orange circled arrow thingy on our iP0d is what is making that song play again and again.

the real question I have to ask myself, and you possibly need to ask yourself, is. how do I stop that loop? What can I change? What can I say or tell myself?


The thing is I know that even with work my self doubt will never go away. It will diminish, but I have to give myself time and put forth effort to quiet the voice of doubt.

The First Piece

This is my first piece in my series of images based around self-doubt. I started by writing a journal entry about my self doubt. I then washed over it with a large watercolor brush and clear water. This blurred and moved the water soluble ink around the page. I used a watercolor pencil to add a border around the edge.


I made some copies of a self-portrait I’d made for my JF365 Challenge. I colored them all one color with liquid watercolors. I glued these down then added a piece of washi tape I’d colored yellow over the black and white stripes. The face represent myself and the warning tape represents a feeling of danger. The sheep represents what I call sheep brain. I layered in some gelatin printed paper and a tea tag.

I added colors and lines radiating out from the sheep to show the influence of sheep brain on my thoughts.

I intended to take more progress shots as I worked but got caught up in the process of journaling.

The image measures 5x7 inches and is available on my etsy shop here.

For a Minute

Can I be honest here for a minute?

Well, I’m going to be, even if you said no. Isn’t that why you read my endless diatribes?

;)

I’ve been harboring an avalanche of self-doubt lately.


I threw myself out there for something that I STILL can’t tell you about, at least not for the next few weeks. The waiting game for knowing if it will happen, or not, has taken it’s toll on my head. I’m questioning everything now. Is this right? Is this wrong? Should I post that picture of the page in my art journal that uses the word fuck? Or is it okay because it’s a found line?* Do I need to be careful with what I write here, because, you know, people are watching.**
Then I had this crazy wonderful idea for a project that will kick off this new thing I’ve been waiting on and the self-doubt has crept into that too. Should I do it? Will people find it fake/inauthentic? Will people make fun of me? Will it crash down around my ears in flames? Will I suck? What will happen if it doesn’t work out?

This doubting of everything is stunting the progress I’ve been making in my art journal. The JF365 challenge has been huge for me, it uses a method I’m familiar with and it’s been forcing me to explore topics I’ve previously explored and look at them in new ways. But this doubt, man, it’s the pits.
This grand idea I had, the doubt is making me consider if I can do it. It’s making me feel like I will fail, no matter what I do. No matter how I try to reframe the doubts into a positive dialog it’s rough and my brain, after allowing the doubt to seep in and fill all the crevices of my noggin is freezing up and breaking apart the concrete of my resolve to make my crazy idea work.

The truth is I’ve allowed the self doubt to worm it’s way in and it’s up to me to warm up and get it out of my head so I can move on with my art and my crazy idea.
This post is the first is what I hope is many that is starting an open and honest dialog with you and myself.

Ask Questions of Yourself

The first half of this is about how when you know stuff you don't question thing. The whole thing is about asking questions and exploring ideas. Something to think about.

How can you get yourself asking more questions about your art process?

 

Figuring Stuff Out

It’s almost 1am and we’re in the midst of a blizzard, or so the weather reports tell me. Well, that’s being a tad dismissive, we’ve got another 12 hours of snow to go, but so far I’m not seeing mountains and mountains of snow. The wind is howling, snow is drifting and even my dogs don’t want to go outside. Right now I’m regretting that 6pm cup of coffee.

I’ve spent the day sipping hot hot tea in an effort to unclog my sinuses which finally appear to be on the mend. i’m not sure if it’s the hot tea or the buffalo chicken fingers I ordered from the local pizza place that I should credit. Maybe it’s time, who knows. I’m starting to feel physically better. My sleep cycle is all kinds of messed up. I’m awake when I should be asleep and sleeping when I should be awake. Of course, that 6pm cup of coffee that tasted oh so good as the snow

I spent some time reflecting on my art journals today while listening to some good music. I flipped through the last year’s worth of my art journals. I’ve got some good stuff recorded. I’m missing some notes I took on business cards that held a lot of good class ideas. But overall, I liked what I saw. I made a lot of progress artistically. My ability to capture a lifelike and emotional portrait increased 10 fold. i’m proud of the work I’ve done. I’m excited for the art show I’ll have in August. This year holds a lot of potential for me.

The thing is, it’s all up in the air right now. I’m not sure how things are going to land but I’m sure it’ll be in the way it should be for me.

The last few days have been interesting in that it’s revealed some artistic and art journaling truths to me that I had previously not know or had ignored. These will be shared here over time.

It's a Process

I’ve been sick, in more ways than one. I’ve had a sinus infection. It’s knocked me on my ass. I’ve also been dealing with disappointment. Abject utter disappointment. Disappointment so deep it hurts. I let myself wallow in it and be consumed with the feeling. The feeling making my sinus infection seem a hundred times worse than perhaps it was. Or maybe it was just that bad* that it could make me feel so helpless.

The cause of the disappointment is not important other than to me. I’ve spent the last few days in a fever induced haze of misery, scribbling in my art journal and watching TV on my laptop and sleeping.

My scrawling and scribbling in my art journal don’t reveal much to me. It chronicles my self-centered misery, my sadness and my sneezes.**

Except one page, a meditative page I did in a sort of mandala style. It’s also self centered, in that there is an image of me in the middle of the page. Radiating out from the center of the image (at the sinuses interestingly enough) are layers of circles filled with various patterns, alternating colors, lines, rays, circles, sheep, and gears. All of this done on a hot colored background in cool colors.

Though I had not planned the imagery it matches the evolution of my thoughts over the last few days, from useless rage and helplessness to being able to think clearly on the problem at hand and coming up with a plan that may work. It’s not done yet, but I like where it’s going

random

I keep writing about the JF365 Challenge over on AJ ning. I keep writing about it because it's a pretty awesome exercise in keeping an art journal and it's not an easy series of prompts. The techniques are different enough that I'm getting a good artistic workout. I highly recomend the book.

Here are a few teasers:

Practice

I've been practicing my calligraphy. I think I've told you the story of how when I was a kid I learned how to write by taking calligraphy class from my 2nd grade teacher. I had a really hard time learning cursive and was forced to spend lots and lots of time working on my penmanship, to little avail. My new, young, 2nd grade teacher, had read an article and some research on teaching kids to write via calligraphy and I became her personal experiment.

So, once a week I stayed after school and was taught some basic calligraphy. I ended up being pretty decent at it but my penmanship never got too great. In fact my handwriting is still referred to as chicken scratch and less kindly as roach droppings.

Sadly I gave up calligraphy in 8th or 8th grade since most of my peers saw it as dorky. Since I was already a geek I couldn't risk delving too far into dork territory. I regret that I gave up my enjoyment of calligraphy and worst yet that I've not had an additional 20 years of practice. I can only imagine what my black letter and gothic would look like if I'd only kept at it.

This post is less about that than the fact I took a dive in the parking lot of my DayJob and landed rather stiffly on my hand and elbow. The right side, of course, and now my wrist is slightly swollen, stiff and sore. Ice and an ace bandage are helping a lot. But writing is not comfortable and calligraphy is out of the question for awhile anyway. This is pretty frustrating for me since I've been making decent progress on my gothic writing.

The one good thing about this is that I'm forced to use less pressure when writing. The only good thing.

Art Days

Jane and I decided to do an arty day where we got together at Jane’s house and we both brought some materials the other hadn’t ever used. This way we got to test drive materials in our art journals so we’d get an informed opinion on them before going out and spending a bunch of money on them. It also gave us a field trip with our JF365 journals.

I was able to test out a whole slew of colored pencils and water soluble colored pencils. I’ll be doing reviews on everything I tested out over the next few weeks. The pencils I tested out include Koh-i-nor Progresso, Faber-Castell Polychrome, Derwent Inktense, Derwent Aquatone, among several others. We had several full hours of chit chat and art making.


If you have an arty friend near to you, I definitely suggest scheduling a day of art material testing and art! It was a ton of fun!

Brief Hiatus

I took an unplanned and brief hiatus from blogging. I've been doing a lot of stuff just not here on the blog.

Jane and I started the JF365 Challenge over on AJ Ning, go check it out. We're working our way through the Journal Fodder 365 book in a group. It's a tough book on journaling but I'm forcing myself to work with the ideas and styles suggested in it. It's interesting to work in a sort of new to me way. I'm adding a lot more random to my pages than I usually do. Which is fun. I'm also writing a lot more. The monthly questions are great for introspective pondering. Good stuff.

As a result of working differently I've bought a few supplies I hadn't used before, so I'll be doing a few reviews soon. Yay!

I'm wokring on translating some of the experience of working the JF365 into posts here and in the next issue of Put it on Paper.

 

Plastic Laminate with the Provocrap Cricut

I picked up a few laminated signs from old sales at the DayJob. Of course, I grabbed them out of the trash, well, sort of, they were on top and clean. These are 1ml thick hot lamination material over card stock. They are thick.

The cricut did REALLY REALLY well with them, cut the plastic like it was butter. I was surprised. The only issue I ran into is that I need the deepcut housing. Even on 6 and the highest pressure setting I could not cut all the way through the bottom layer of plastic even though I cut it on a blade setting of 6, high pressure 4 times. It did score the bottom layer enough that I was able to sort of pop it out.

So it’s off to Amazon I go to buy a deep cut housing. Though I’m tempted to see if I can just sand off the bottom of my current housing...

I’m going to see if I can snag a bunch of these old signs, I know some of them are much larger, 14x17! That might be cool to play around with... They also have some in lighter weight plastic... Probably the stuff they call 5mil (actually 1/2 ml thick) would be easily cut on the crapcut.

I’ve got too many ideas and not enough time.

Tomorrow I'll show you what i'm doing with these super simple stencils.

Cutting Bristol Board on the Crapcut

I wrote about my bookmarks in my last post. The cricut did admirably with the thick bristol board I was using, hardly board weight really, but more heavy weight paper. Canson XL bristol to be exact. I get it in 11x14 inch pads for a decent price and really like how it works with my recent paint scraping and stencil work.

As long as the paint layer was thin enough the cricut did just fine, if the paint was slightly thicker not so much. Also the paint and paper dulled the blade quickly, though the blade was already pretty dull anyway. I had to mess around with the pressure (high) and # of cuts (2) and speed(fast.) It also did okay with medium pressure and 3 cuts on fast speed.

Of course right after doing bristol I tried to cut thin painted paper with the same blade, not my best idea. After cutting bristol and painted bristol i'm pretty sure I'll need to change blades everytime, but I haven't tried it with a brand new blade.

More Cutting Stuff

Occasionally I'll get an idea, an idea that seems so good, I can't help but to follow it down whatever rabbit hole it takes me, and that is what I did X3 this weekend.

Rabbit Hole #1

Bookmarks. I saw these super cool book marks on someone's web page somewhere. Small, about 3 inches by 1.5 inches with a flap to grip the page- genius! I designed a quick piece in Make the Cut, slapped some of my painted bristol on the Crapcut and yeehaw, bookmarks! The came out neato.(I'll write about how well the crapcut did and didn't do in another post.)

Rabbit Hole #2

Secret Santa Gift Exploding Box. A few years ago I found a template online for a box with an attached lid that sort of screwed down on top of the box. I cna't find the one I made years ago. So I searched and searched and searched. I found a template for "wedding boxes" in the Make the Cut archive. It was pretty in accurate. I made 5 copies with tweaks to the file before I made 1 that worked properly. Also it doesn't help that the provocrap crapcut can't make accurate cuts. I ended up making a 3.25x3.25x4 inch box with lid attached. Ilike exploding box better than wedding box. After I made the 4 mock ups I made 2 in colored paper.

No,, I'm not going to tell you what's actually IN the box, not that my workplace secret santa reads my blog, but I'll tell you it's local and cute.

Rabbit Hole #3

X's and O's. Or my handmade Christmas Paper. If you've been following me for any period of time you know I make my own Christmas paper. Usually I scrounge up packing paper and what not, butthis year has been pretty thin on the packing paper front. So, I bought a cheap pad of newsprint for about $5. I then started to design a variety of stencils. X's, O's, some cool squares and what i'm calling black eye'd peas. I don't have pics of all of them since I spent 2 days designing them and not cutting them.I certainly didn't have time to use them making paper, go figure. This weekend Christiw and I will clean off the kitchen table, get out the paint and sharpies and attack some newsprint to make our own wrapping paper. (I have to say I've also convinced a bunch of my friends to do this with their kids, or so they claim.)

Recycled Stickers

As a compulsive hoarder and trash picker I have many of my coworkers trained to bring me goodies- things they know I'll use in a creative recycled way. I had a coworker who used to send my way out of date and unused marketing stickers. I have rolls and rolls of them. I often use them to secure packages in lue of tape. I mean, after all, tape is expensive. They work well for that purpose.

Those stickers are all paper, meant to be torn and not last a long time. She also gave me 60 small 2x2 inch vinyl stickers, which are meant to last and last. I've been randomly sticking them all over the place- planners etc, as is. Randomly I thought to myself, "Supposedly the provocrap crapcut can cut vinyl with ease, I wonder if I can control it well enough to cut one of my shapes out of these little stickers?"

Lo and behold, hell's yeah, I figured it out, and I have 30 of these little sheep.


And then and untold amount of these. I'm telling you, making this work has made me unbelieveably happy.

So far I've only stuck these to my sketchbooks and my coworker's computer...

This led me to think, what could I do with those round paper stickers? Since I'm on a sheep kick lately, I cut some sheep out of them...

Not my most inspired thoguth. BUT! Now I'm thinking what IF I painted those round stickers? I know the crapcut will cut through paint as long as it's dry and a thin coat... So maybe I can paint and spray some stickers and get totally custom sheep. (heh< comment if you get the irony of that statement.) This may or maynot be a plot for me to go to Michael's and use my coupon to buy some liquatex spaypaint...

(Also if you haven't snagged the new flickr app for your phone, DO IT NOW, better than instagram!)

A Cautionary Tale

If you make a really awesome stencil.

And you make a lot of really awesome stenciled cut outs. And you clean the stencil off between copies in your book for just such things. Make sure you don't forget it when you're done, 'cause your stencil will glue itself to the page and getting it out without damage is impossible. :(

A Little More on Flack

This article is a beautiful one about self censorship. I think that at some point we all lose our way toward our personal voice/vision for our own art. Call it authenticity or whatever, but we have to fight to get back to it. Fight for our unique and personal vision to come through.

In the past all you had to fight was yourself, the expectations of critics and your own inner critic. Now we have the machine of the "art" industry pumping out tools and toys for us to use, straight off the shelf.

For me part of the joy of art was learning to make do with what I had and adapting other tools toward my needs.A little gumption and an idea was all I needed to stoke the creative fire already buring inside.

Cutting Stencils

I've gotten a million questions about how I'm cutting my stencils. First I start with an idea then I decide how I'm going to make that work- do I draw it and then shoot a pic or do I create the image in Make the Cut? It all depends on how I want the resulting stencil to look. If I'm going for a wonky slightly off or not perfect look I generally sketch the idea out in a thick ink pen. Like these:

If I want something that is smooth and mechanical looking I'll create the image completely in the computer from either the idea or an photo. Like this:

Then I've got what I call my focal stencils that I create with a combination of hand work and computer editing. These take a lot of time to create.


The easy answer to how I'm cutting my stencils is that I'm using the pixel trace setting in Make the Cut to create a stencil or diecut and then using my cricut to cut.

Please be aware that I'm using a hacked version of Make the Cut. If you purchase a new version of Make the Cut you will not be able to use it with your cricut. Please see this post for why it will no longer work. Though it could be said that Provocrap is a controlling manipulative spouse and that would tell you all you need to know.

 

Flack

I've gotten flack for being more of an arty art journaler than a writing or cute art journaler. I don't do pretty faces with cutesy quotes. Instead I write my heart out and cover it with paint. I let my writing become part of my finished pieces, even these faces that I've been painting, they have been born out of my art journaling process. Not all of these pieces have deep writing behind the paint, but I learned this process through my art journal.

My art journal is my greatest tool in my art making arsenal. Without it, I'm not sure where my art would be today.

In the images below you can see the words peaking through the layers of paint. Sometimes my journal contains simple lists- like the lists of things I ate during a road trip, a list of purchases made one weekend, beers I tried. Other times it's long paragraphs about influences, things I've read, people I've interacted with, gripes with life. I hang my paint on top of these words, not needing to add a quote or make it pretty. My art journal is a place of no fear. I don't always show it, sometimes it's too raw.

My art journal influences my art and is influenced by my art, it's a never ending circle.

Facebook

Facebook changed how it's pages interact with the people who like a business page. We were all good doobies and made our business a page instead of conducting business on our personal profiles or just using a personal page for our art. So FB put the screws to the pages. If I want to reach all 402 people who have "liked" my page I need to pay $5 per post, then they guarantee all 400 people on my page will see it, if I don't pay $5 then only about 130 people see it. Additionally if I go ahead and schedule updates they meterout the number of people who see the posts across all the posts per day so the maximum number of people who see the posts totals 130. Pretty god damn sneaky if you ask me.

I won't be eliminating my use of the Comfortable Shoes Studio page but I won't be using it as much and I'll probably use my blog more. Hopefully I'll be writing more over this winter and spring.

Somethign I can't wait to share with everyone is that I have scored a wall at a local cafe to hang my art. It's not a big space, a spot for 10 or so paintings and the ability to have an opening night. So I'll update you all more on that. It's a long way off, August of 2013, but that's good, I'll be able to get a lot of ready for it.

More Details

I'vebeen painting a few more faces. These are nearing completion. I need to add a few more details and some stencils to the background but for the most part these are done.