Fall Flow

Balloon Vine seed pod November 2023

Fall is my favorite time of year. It’s the reward for surviving a Mississippi summer. The respite from humidity and sweaty nights and the reward for lasting another season. Fall brings with it the thankfulness of making it through another year no matter if it was good or bad, successful or failure, feast or famine. It’s a time to reflect on the year’s accomplishments and start planning for the year to come.

The photo above is from a balloon vine. I’ve shared some pictures of this plant before HERE. You can buy seeds for this vine and it’s a fast growing hearty little plant but it also just grows wild here on the fencelines in Mississippi. When you shake the seedpods you can hear the small black seeds rattling around the dry brittle husk of the lantern shaped seed head. I know a lot of people would have passed by a brown vine lying on the ground by a fence but sometimes you have to be willing to see potential in the details. Be willing to look past typical beauty and see beauty in the atypical. Be willing to see potential where others might not. Light, texture, and color can be found anywhere if you just look hard enough. Potential can be found anywhere if you’re willing to look around for it, just a bit.

I struggle to balance my art practice with my office job and my “Momma job” constantly. Art isn’t something that you just do as a hobby, it can be, but for many of us, we know it’s just a part of life, a part of who we are. We’re happiest when we get to do something creative. It fulfills that part of ourselves that wants to create, to bring something we see in our mind to life that no one has ever seen or thought of before. Making art a lot of the time is as involuntary as breathing. When I can see a little beauty in something as mundane as a dried, dead vine on a fence row that makes me happy. The image above was taken with my phone. A quick snap as the sun went down and yet the light and the composition make me pleased.  Could I have gotten my big hulking Nikon out of the bag in my car? Sure. Did I really need to for an Instagram post? Maybe, maybe not. It’s just the fact that I got to take a neat picture and share it that made me happy, and at its core that’s all an artist wants to do. We want to make something with all the enthusiasm of a child finishing a finger painting jumping up and down and asking excitedly, "Can we put it on the fridge!?!” We want to share something that elicits a reaction.

As we go into the weekend I hope you find something that makes you happy, do something that makes you proud of yourself, and find someone to share that feeling with as well.

Happy weekend my lovelies.

That's not a mistake, that's a learning opportunity....

“Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make Good. Art.”
- Neil Gaiman

I don’t know if I’m making good art, but I’m making art and that’s the important part. I’ve been reading quite a bit since the first of the year and making plans for the coming year and giving myself some deadlines. Hellfire, I even printed out one of those “Goal Setting Workbooks” and even tried to plan out my year quarter by quarter with some clear-cut goals every three months. I know everyone makes resolutions in January, but I really wanted to give myself some time to not only make resolutions for the year going forward but a plan and a roadmap to get there. I think what I’ve been missing in my creative life is a little application of my business knowledge and giving myself some clear deadlines to get stuff done. They’re arbitrary deadlines, just for me, but it gives me some accountability. And honestly, they’re not all BIG goals, but just some small goals that are completely doable if I’ll just take the time to sit down and do them.

I’ve been playing around in a new journal/sketchbook with limited success. The paper is great for writing and handles pens, pencils, and colored pencils fairly well, but NOT water. It’s almost like the most minimal amount of water turns this paper to mush. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s disappointing because I love watercolors, watercolor markers, and watercolor pencils, but this paper literally tries to melt when you apply water to it. The second drawing is a result of my trying to use watercolor markers on top of some crumpled brown paper bag. I had thought just to scrap the page, but sat down the next day and tried to layer some different papers and acrylic paint on top, and it just…. ugh. Not my best moment. To me, it’s a failure, but it’s also a learning moment too. Sometimes we just have a fail and that’s okay. You learn from it and move on. And needless to say, I won’t be buying another Royal & Langnickel sketchbook any time soon. It will probably make me use my colored pencils more though I have a love/hate relationship with colored pencils.

I hope you’re all doing well here in the new year. Let me know what you’ve been up to in the comments below. I’ll try to get more consistent with blogging again. I am writing more for the local newspaper so maybe I can get back into the general writing habit again. Have a great day my lovelies, all the best to you. Thanks as always for reading.

Little Sketches....

I journal quite a bit. It’s a mixture of art journaling and pure journaling where you just pour words on a page. Sometimes there’s a theme, many times not. I normally use sketchbooks instead of true journals with lines because then the book can become my playground. A place to write and doodle and mess around with watercolors, pencils, and markers. I drew the above on my birthday and just wanted something cute on the side of the page for the season. It’s drawn with just a Ticonderoga #2 pencil and watercolor pencils. Nothing fancy or honestly very good but just a little happy on the side of the page. I did scan it in and turn it into something fun for Thanksgiving that I’ll share next week. Happy Wednesday my friends!