Artsy Fun

Another Reminder To Myself

There is no automatic virtue, no automatic advantage to doing things the hard way.

My best bet is always to check out the easy way first and only add more work if necessary to get the job done.

A small white card that reads “start with the easy way and build from that.”
Image description: a small white card on a wooden surface. Handwritten text on the card reads ‘Start with the the easy way and build from that.’ most of the text is in black capital letters but the words ‘Easy Way’ have softer lines and are outlined in black with the centre of each letter coloured in either red, yellow, orange or purple. The word ‘easy’ has some bright gold lines sprinkled around it to highlight it and the background of the whole card had small black dots.

Taking an easy route

Except for meditative doodles, I don’t do a lot of detailed artwork.

Anything that requires a lot of prep work or that needs a bunch of measurements makes the energy cost of getting started way too high for me.

(Meditative doodles are just ‘in the moment’ type of details so they don’t have the same cost.)

But, that being said, I like those round, repetitive designs that a lot of people call mandalas. I’m pretty sure that mandalas are a specific type of design that has a cultural meaning so I won’t use that name for the design I want to make.

I’m not trying to borrow or appropriate a cultural practice , I’m not pretending that what I am doing is sacred, nor am I adding meaning to it – I just want to make a pattern in a circle.

But making a pattern in a circle requires a lot of measuring and every time I have tried that, I have gotten bored with the measuring and haven’t finished the design.

Until now!

Last week, I bought some templates for another project and one of them was a circular pattern of straight lines.

The energy cost of using a template to make my ‘measurements’ is very low.

So now I have an easy route to creating these patterns for myself and I won’t end up abandoning my projects partway through.

Really, taking an easy route gets a bad rap a lot of the time.

Taking the hard route for its own sake, especially if it means you lose the fun and the purpose, is just foolish.

Reminder: Creativity is the Point

I gave an introduction at a family painting class this morning and I think I struck a chord with the kids and parents there.

I hadn’t really thought about what to say, hadn’t actually planned on doing an intro, so I ended up talking about how the fun of creativity was the point of the whole thing. And if the kids (or the adults) we’re getting stressed about how their painting was going, it was ok to turn it into a whole different thing. In fact, they could just smear paint around on the canvas if they wanted – as long as they enjoyed doing it.

I swear I felt a sense of relief in the room.

And when I went around a little later, several kids had done their own thing – some making delightfully glorious messes and others just veering off on their own course. I was delighted to see it.

And one kid was struggling through the process of creating the planned piece so I helped him take a break from the project and try something else.

I felt like I made a connection, did some important work, like what I said had mattered.

I love this feeling.

Art experiments

I’m trying to get a certain effect with small painted flowers but I haven’t figured out exactly how to do it yet.

I can’t really describe what I’m trying to do but I’m content with moving paint around on paper until I get what I’m looking for.

And even the results that aren’t quite right are still very fun.

Two small paintings of flowers laid down on a wooden patio railing.
Two small paintings resting on a wooden patio rail. The painting on the left has a cluster of thumbprint sized flowers in pink, orange, yellow and blue on white paper with dots in the background. The one on the right is on a cardboard card with a sprinkle of tiny flowers in pink, blue, yellow, and orange on the right side against a background of thin black lines.

Today, I’m telling stories

A photo of a large white building that houses a museum. Trees, grass and flowers are in the foreground.
A photo of Torbay History House – a museum and activity centre for community heritage activities. The white two story building with a roofed, wrap-around porch is in the back of the photo with an expanse of green lawn, flowerbeds, and trees.

I was lucky to be invited to tell stories at Torbay History House today – two 45 minute sets of animal stories for kids.

Since I knew that my audience would be very young, I decided to intersperse my stories with some action songs and it has worked out marvellously – the kids and their grown-ups had a great time. And so did I!

Well, we did in the first set anyway, I’m just heading in for my second set now.