Comfortable Shoes Studio

Review: Xtras for Creative Learning

This past Saturday I went to Xtras for Creative Reuse. It’s this place where you pay a small membership fee ($5) and then you can buy a full grocery bag full of stuff for $8. They have other membership levels taht allow you to buy full carts of stuff or several bags at a time. They get off cuts and useful waste from businesses and other things. They had the leftovers from an entire office that closed down, from footrests to paperclips. They also had leftover and miss embroidered items from a shop that makes patches. Large sheets of paper, fabrics and yarn. It’s basically a massive junk shop. If you think like me, it’s a toy shop.

To get there I had to travel into Lynn, MA and down a few side streets to a spot just off the Lynnway. I should have shot a few pics of the building. It was one of the huge old industrial buildings with high ceilings and 100 years of history. It was attractive in that old factory warehouse kind of way. The area is kinda rough and like much of Lynn kind of run down. Once I climbed the 3 flights of stairs to their suite I was surrounded by stuff. All kinds of great recycled cast off stuff. Entire offices had been dumped into this place, all of it mine for the taking provided I could stuff it into the shopping bag they provided. There was loads of old Reebok schwag, the kind of stuff company employees are given to make them feel good.

I found all kinds of great stuff for my art. If you have a place like Xtras near you you should check it out.

Next time I'm there I'll snag some pics.

Follow them on facebook!

Phase 3 of the Big Thing

I can finally reveal part 3 of the “big thing.” Part 3 of the big thing is that I’m leaving my job the second week of May. I’m going to spend the summer making art, working on my online art classes as well as retooling my class site, art journaling ning. It’s not an optimal time for me to leave my job but I figured if I don’t make the leap now I’d never take a summer off, and well, I wanted to try and see if I can make books, paint and write classes. I’ve got plans for a funky thing that I’m going to call an artist’s zine/book. Super limited edition type of thing, hand made, thick with my writing and lots of art journaling goodies packed in. I’ve got a couple of class planned out. I’m at the fleshing them out stage and outlining for videos stage. Lots of good things going on.

I’m sure many of you have heard rumors about ning’s decision to restructure and increase prices. Ning has moved from ning 2 to Ning 3.0 status. I have a year and a half to change to Ning 3.0. The problem is that Ning 3.0 does not have all the features that we currently use on ArtJournaling ning. Though they may add them at some point. The second problem is that it’s increasing the price from a moderate $250/yr to about $600/yr. This is pretty drastic. A big part of what I’ve been doing these last few weeks (when I haven’t been blogging) is exploring other options for AJ ning. I’ve made no secret that I’ve been less than pleased with ning’s formats and options for classes. It’s a pain for the presenters to set up classes, and when I have guest teachers most cannot figure out how to update the class. This makes a lot of work for me on the back end of things, and while I’ve been working it’s been a total pita.

the replacement is designed for education and I’ve had a few people check out the site and they’ve told me it’s easy to navigate, easy to interact, and easy to look at. It’s not ready for new people yet, as I’m still tweaking the formating and working on the site. Not to worry, AJ ning is staying online.

Oh yeah, the new site is going to have an art journaling wiki. Super easy to search, loads of info, the ability to ask questions, and loads of links to videos and blogs.

Holy crapola, I’m excited!

Step One of the "Big Thing"

I can share with you now part 1 of the “big thing.”

Yesterday I received my acceptance letter for Lesley University’s Expressive Therapies program with a specialization in Art Therapy and Mental Health Counseling. I’ll probably take the 3 year track to complete the program starting this Fall. How exciting is that?


I hope to learn how to take my art journaling techniques and turn them into  more therapeutic (and licensed) practices. I have lots of great plans and ideas, but those will have to wait for another month or so before I can share them with you. Needless to say I’m pretty excited.

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?

 

Article from Shambhala Sun magazine

I’ve been trying to read more lately and a friend gave me a copy of last months Shambala Sun*. It had a number of interesting articles in it but one that I particularly enjoyed was called “What’s Your verdict?” by Bonnie Friedman. While it was written with the writer in mind it also applies to the artist.

The premise of the article is that people tend to diminish their happiness over success when it is finally achieved. So you achieve success and allow yourself only a little happiness if any at all. This explains the dull feeling people sometimes get after achieving success. As an example, let’s say you have an art journaler you respect, you decide you want to share work with that person (in their ning group) and you hope that someday that person takes notice and says something good about  your work. FInally it happens and for a fleeting moment you feel good but you discount it by telling yourself, “Eh, it’s just one comment.” Or, “What she said wasn’t that great.” even though something good happened you let your inner critic diminish the impact.

Basically, the idea of the article is a good one about your inner critic and how to deal with it, which is a very Chapter 2 of JF365 type of thing. You should check it out.

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

PostSecret at Endicott College

If you’ve followed me on twitter or facebook for any amount of time you know I’m a huge PostSecret.com fan. I’ve been watching the site for years now. I’ve watched it grow from something small to being a huge hit. If you aren’t familiar with the site, Frank invites you to send a postcard containing your secret to him completely anonymously. I’ve seen a great many secrets that resonate with me, and perhaps that’s why I continue to go to the site every Monday to see the Sunday secrets. Maybe it’s because I’ve got a few secrets of my own, or maybe I find it to be a deeply interesting idea. Whatever it is, you should check out the site, and maybe send your secret into Frank.

I've been waiting for years to see Frank speak somewhere near me. I've missed him a couple of time in Boston and once in another city nearby. When I saw he was going to be at a college in my city, I jumped on the opportunity. I dragged C along for the ride.

If you get a chance go see Frank speak, I strongly urge you to go. It’s worth your time to hear his beautiful words, the words of the people there and the images he shares. Take someone you love, it could change their life, or yours.

(I was only allowed to take pics for the first 5 minutes of the event, after that no photos were allowed.)

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!

Find Art

Sometimes finding art around you is as simple as looking. These are in the window at my local coffee shop.

Toner Transfer Journal Junky Style

The Journal Junkies use toner transfers in their journals. I'm always jealous of well done toner transfers, as mine have almost always failed. Goof off is the first product I've used that gives great results. Watch the video, and work in a well ventilated area away from flames.

 

Week in Photos #12

Busy week and the typepad app will only let me load 5 pics. Boo!

Drawing People

I’ve started to work through the Drawing Tutorials Online figure drawing from memory instruction series. You can get it by signing up for his newsletter here.

I took figure drawing in college and then took a continuing education credit at the School of the Museum years later. I haven't done figure drawing in years. I’m trying to work with some friends to get another friend to pose for us. Since I don’t want to be too rusty when I go into the session I decided I’d brush up on my skills with the DTO lessons.

As with my college classes the first DTO lesson is about gesture drawings and working with a simple skeletal figure. I’m very familiar with this lesson. It was what we spent the first week of our figure drawing classes doing. Short 30 second poses. It is a great way to warm up.

I decided to work with my yellow brush pen and a blue brush pen. In college I used to do my figure drawing with yellow, orange, red, and dark blue colored pencils working in layers. This method works well for me. When I took the class after college the professor complained that I chose difficult materials since I brought watercolors and a long liner brush. :)

Anyway, since I don’t have anyone to pose for me I went online and found a few websites with free images to draw from. The best was this one. Caution it is NSFW EVER. I mean never ever. Lots and lots of n@ked people. I did 20 quick gesture skeleton drawings. And by quick I mean quick, spending no more than a minute or 2 each. I also worked in a dirt cheap sketchbook.

It was a good challenge and by the end of the 30 minutes I spent sketching I really wanted to flesh out the images and create a finished drawing. Alas that was not the goal for tonight, tonight was about looking and recording quickly and with simple methods. It was about getting the eye’s and hands attuned to the figure. It was learning to see.

Week in Photos #11

I'm venturing out from my usual walk into work images. Trying to find beauty in another way.

Put it on Paper #2

It's here! You can get it at the link below. Check out that sweet robot on the cover by Chongolio!

Put it on Paper: Put it on Paper Volume 1 #2

 

Quentin Blake

Quentin Blake is one of my favorite authors. You know his work if you've ever read any of Roald Dahl's books.

Love him.

 

 

Week in Photos #8

I've not done this in a few weeks. I've been feeling a little off my photo game. I've been looking for new inspiration. So here you go.

Decay

There is a certain amount of beauty locked into decay, trapped with it is always a large amount of sadness. As I travel around the area where I grew up I’m able to see the struggles of keeping things standing. One of these days i’m going to need to travel with my camera or a pochade.


Last year the Beehive Collective raised $10,000 to repair and renovate the park overlooking the Bad Little Falls in Machias, Maine. The Bad Little Falls park is one of my favorite spots in Machias and sadly the kickstarter campaign ended before I could give. They repaired the guard rails, a dancefloor and installed 2 gazebos where bands can play. One day a year the park is lit up and is lively. I’m happy to see that the Beehive was able to save one of my favorite places in DownEast Maine.

I’ve been fascinated with buildings that are crumbling. Sad to see them start to cave in and be destroyed. Nature takes her toll on the construction of man. The barn I grew up with, my father had a concrete floor poured in before I was aware of such things. Growing up we swung on ropes from one side to the other, lifted ourselves far too high above the cement floor with block and tackle attached to our belts, and built forts in bales of hay.  

It’s been close to 20 years since the barn has been used for anything useful. A thick mat of wild grapes grows before the door, which was last accessed 5 years or so ago. It remains locked both with a chain and padlock but through mother nature’s frost cement is heaved in such a way that the doors will no longer open more than a few inches.

My happy memories of this place beg me to see it repaired but my brain tells me that this barn will eventually return to the earth as so many other buildings in the area have gone before.

 

Inspiration from Other Places

I bought my ukelele back in  1999. I purchased the cheapest uke I could find at the local music shop, Ted Coles in Salem, MA. Ted Coles is no longer in business and there is no wonder why. I had the worst customer service I’ve ever encountered in there, and never went back. The ukelele cost about $35, with no case and no instructions. I managed to find a VERY beat up case on eBay for about $5 and a bunch of instructional books at Borders. I love how beat up the case is, but I think it’s time I paint it and make it 100% mine.

The uke has served my horrible playing skills well. It sounds about as good as I play, which is to say, pretty horrible. I have no rhythm and I’m tone deaf but I enjoy plucking away at its strings and generally enjoying the sounds the uke makes.

I’ve had it stored at my parent’s place for the last 5 years or so, why I don’t know. It always seemed to miss being packed with me as I came home. Now it’s here with me and I hope to draw it a few times, and play it a lot.

 

Finished Project

I started the thank you ATC project as a way to thank the people who contributed to the AJ ning funding drive. I thought it would be an easy way to say thanks... I was wrong. ATC are a lot of work and bangning out 34 of them took a lot longer than I’d expected. When I first started I wasn’t sure what I was going to do on them. It dawned on me that I should do something people would recognize as mine and something I enjoyed, obviously that had to be portraits.

When you think ATC size, you might think it’s a simple and easy size, fast to fill. After all it’s a small size, so it should be less effort to fill them up. I wrote about my process with these cards before but what I’m most surprised about is how much better I got with concentrated effort. 34 cards done over a 2 week spread of time. In this time I learn how my tools work on the paper I’ve chosen and how to control them for maximum effect. Dry lines, angles, broken line, speed of the pen, rough paper, cross hatching all of that were things that I learned to effectively use over the course of this experiment.You can see the difference in how I used the pens from card 1 to card 34.


You can also see the difference in how I saw the people I was drawing. Some of these images I drew from direct observation and others from photos from flickr’s commons. You can see the change in my direct observation skills from card number 4 to card 25.


It’s amazing what you learn in 34 small drawings that you expected to be easy. This was way more work than I imagined. I probably won’t do another set of ATC for a good long time. These will for sure be collector’s items and rare.

Week in Photos 6

Days of Art

The last few days have been days of art. I’ve been soaking them up and putting them into the reserve to carry me through the next few months. I’m headed back to the DayJob on Monday so I can continue to fund my art activities. The last few days have been nothing short of glorious. It doesn’t get much better than spending days off of the DayJob making art.

I’ve been banging out the thank you ATCs for the ArtJournaling.ning.com sponsors,  I’m 24 into the total of 34. Only 10 left. I’m pretty excited about getting them done so timely. I think I can get another 5 or so done today.

I spent Saturday doing my usual art visit with Jane in Salem.We talked about Put it on Paper, our reviews we’ll be doing, updates on the articles for the next issue and things we’ll be doing on the blog. Pretty exciting stuff. Then we spent the rest of the AM drawing around Salem. I also stopped to snap a lot of pics along the way.

In the afternoon, I switched lenses and C and I wandered up to Atomic for some iced caffeinated goodness and then went to sit in the Common. We stumbled upon [space] having an interactive still life. They invited us to sit down and participate, so I did. Now that I’m 10+ years out of college it was a blast listening to the art school kids talk art. I haven’t heard so much art speak in one place since 1998. It was particularly enjoyable to sit down and sketch an everything and the kitchen sink still life, since I haven’t done that since drawing 1. I should have moved around the still life more and tried a few different angles, I really wanted to draw this parrot sculpture again, but instead stuck to my spot and continued on making muddy sketches. It was fun.

The vintage 28-50mm Magnum lens performed really well today when I was in Salem. I picked up a lcd viewfinder  so I could focus the manual lenses in harsh light and it made all the difference in using my vintage manual lenses. Where I was unable to get a sharp focus before I did this time. Perfectly sharp. The Star-d 28mm lens(rebranded vivitar) gives me fits in harsh light. I need to get a lens hood. It completely flairs out and I end up with washed out image. I don’t even get good flair with it, just washed out images. So aggravating. But when it was good it was really good.

magnum lens

magnum lens

star-d lens

star-d lens

Fiddle Jam

On the first and third friday of every month the cafe that I frequent has live traditional music featuring fiddles, banjos, and guitars. The lineup of musicians changes from session to session and they don’t have a list of songs they play, instead they chit chat and play stuff that comes to mind. It’s spontaneous and free flowing music. It’s really cool to watch a bunch of really good musicians jam together. I did a few good drawings but mostly they weren’t very good. Mostly though I simply had a good time drawing and sketching.

Cards Full of Faces

I wanted to show you some of the progress I’m making on the thank you ATC. I’m (as of this writing) on card number 19. I’ve stumbled into some great images in the Flickr Commons of Civil War era people. The great thing about that era is the mustaches on the dudes. There are some seriously awesome mustaches in those archives. The other things that is interesting is the contrast in women’s hair styles, some are completely severe and look like they hurt and others have some unkempt hair.

The interesting thing in the photographs is how washed out many of them are, as if proper lighting wasn’t thought of, or they were purposefully over exposed to hide some wrinkles and other imperfections. The overexposure of much of the face leaves the viewer with sharp contrast around the eyes and clear views of crow’s feet. I really love drawing from these images.

So here you have cards 16 through 19:




I also wanted to show you the business end of the Uniball Signo Bit 0.18 pen I’m using to start most of these images. It’s so small my camera had a really hard time focusing on it. I put my uni kuru toga in the pic to give you a reference of the size of that tip. The kuru toga is a 0.5 tip. The Signo Bit is a 0.18. It’s tiny and allows me to get miniscule hair thin lines. It’s also waterproof and lightfast. It’s not quite as dark a black as the Signo Bit pens but for a micro tip pen it’s pretty great. I highly recommend this pen to anyone who wants a micro tipped pen to throw in their sketching bag. (You can get it at Jetpens as well as refills!)

Supported

Well it’s been a crazy few weeks here in Comfortable Shoes Studio. A few weeks back I had car troubles and it completely depleted my reserves. It came as quite a shock when Ning sent me the email telling me that the yearly fee was coming due soon. Now, I know that the fee is due in the last week of July, it’s an every year sort of thing. It’s also one of those things I set out of my mind, especially when things are rough. So I paid for the brake system on one car and then the muffler on the other and didn’t think of poor Ning.

Like many people, I live paycheck to paycheck with a small reserve of funds built up over time. In fact I had been doing pretty well, I had cashed in my stock options, bought a shiny new computer and video camera and paid a bill or two. Needless to say I had a little buyer’s remorse when both cars decided to break down at once. So when that Ning bill came up as due soon, I decided to do my usual funding drive, but unlike most years where I ask for part of the fee, I asked the members for as much of it as we could get.

The outpouring of support, kind emails, and love of the group has been overwhelming and has on more than one occasion brought tears to my eyes. The members of Artjournaling.ning.com are the best in the world. I received donations from Germany, Australia, Canada, South America, England, and South Africa. I closed donations as soon as we hit the amount needed to pay the fee. After I closed the doors, people still wanted to donate, they sent in tips via the tip jar in the Challenge group. I got many more emails, again positive about the group.

It was simply overwhelming. We raised the full fee in 18 hours.

I’ve received a few extra donations and I’m finding a way to sink that into the site. I decided straight away that the first thing I’d do to thank everyone who donated was send them a handwritten thank you note. After we reached the funding goal in 18 hours I wanted to do something a little more, so I decided I could fit an ATC into each envelope. I cut a bunch of ATC from some nice watercolor paper grabbed my pens and set to work.

I thought that the ATC size would be a fast way to get everyone a small token of thanks. Heh. Heh. Heh. It is small, I’m working with smaller pens- Uniball Signo Bit 0.18 and Signo DX 0.28 in black with a wash of watercolor. These pens are tiny and I decided to stretch my artistic muscles by doing tiny little portraits. It took me a few cards to get accustomed to the ATC size but now I’m 13 cards into making a set of 34. Each card is taking much longer to complete than I had expected. Though I’ve shrunk the size of the portraits down I have not shrunk the time of creation down. Each of the ATC takes as long as a 5x7 inch portrait to create. So I’m spending anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes on each card. I was planning on spending a mere 15 min per card, but working with micro tips simply doesn’t allow me to speed the process up. If anyone ever tells you ATC are easy, they are totally wrong.


I’ve done some of the cards from life while sitting in Atomic Cafe and sipping an iced Americano, the rest have been drawn from images in the Flickr Commons. I’ve been giving my own spin to each image. I’m enjoying the process even if it was unexpected.

Week in Photos #5