Some of my Sketchbook from January

This month Ive been in hospital with a manic episode of bipolar disorder and working away in my sketchbooks.
Ive also been using my art as therapy to retrace my past to put myself together again, because I really turn myself upside down in these episodes.

These next two sketches were done on the 23rd January. I think this just resembles sadness. I like the way she turned out and hope you see the expressive quality of my soul. It is also following on with my FF course, continuing to try out different feature placement and hairstyles. I'm calling her my soul girl.

 

This sketch represents my grief for the three miscarriages and the two ectopics I had in my 30's and 40's.  It was great to release all this emotion and encapsulate it in my art. Art really does Heal.

The following two sketches were done on the 24th. This whimsical sketch is more practice for my WOW course.   I can see I'm quite unwell from the drawing but it documents my progress and lets me know Im still present as I draw her.

 

Ive also been continuing to do practice work on my fabulous faces,  following on from the course I took at willowing. I just played with another hairstyle in this one and it kinda looks like a big multi legged spider. She also looks like an alien creature. I think this represents the darkness of my illness when Im feeling despair.

The  sketch I also did on the 24th is my little butterfly girl. I used cutouts from a magazine to make the butterflies for her hair. Being so ill has kept me thinking of transforming all of my negative thoughts into great beautiful healthy healing thoughts. Dont you just love the symbolism of butterflies. It was fun to play with such a limited amount of art materials too.  I can already feel them transforming my previous grief. It also shows how up and down like a rollercoaster bipolar is.  One minute you feel reallly down and the next minute you feel either okay or high as a kite.

Looking back into the past, my first ever bipolar episode, Ive been trying to find a way back from the hell I found myself in then. This is my Girl in a Mess painting. This is how I felt whilst spending 7 months in the hospital, feeling sad and lost. I did this painting on the 26th of January. I like the way I produced this painting. I asked for an eyedropper but there wasnt any, instead I used a syringe to drop and squirt paint onto the page before I drew out my girl. It represent my regression whilst in hospital as well as my lost youth, I was only 26 when I was first diagnosed. It holds and releases all of my pain from that past.