Angel of Forgiveness

 On the 27th I was working on my Art Heart and Healing course doing an angel that I could connect to.  I was finding lots of forgiveness in my life for myself and my feelings and I thought it would be great to draw and paint an angel of forgiveness. I collaged and painted this one into my re-claimed board book.

Continuing to practice my fabulous faces on the 27th, I drew and painted a face I really like so I thought I'd share it with you all.

Drawing Board

On the 26th of January I felt a bit more uplifted and chose to doodle and paint and personalise my drawing board.  On the front where the clip is I doodle a little garden scene with birds, butterflies and a tree, even a snake in the long grass to represent Bry.  The tree represents the tree of life, the leaves the blosoming of love and the castles are just that, the castles we build in the air.
On the back I felt inspired to do another face and collage some butterflies as I felt the grief from the previous day or two transforming, coming through the darkeness once more.   I just love my butterflies!

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.

Transformation

Through my grieving healing proccess using my sketchbook I tried out another face and was thinking about how I would find a hairstlye for her. Now I was thinking to myself what should I do with her hair. When the very next thing that happened to me was the voice of a very close friend came to me and said use butterflies. (the muse doess find us) Now I said to lynns voice yeah I love that idea because its kinda how Im feeling at the moment, all my negative thinking is positively transforming into well being and good thoughs. Each butterfly represents each negative thought transforming so beautifully. Now I though about how much Willowing healing courses are doing for me and wrote Art Saves on the left-side of the page.
And thought about how much it does as I drew more butterflies around the lettering and then crystalised my feelings of feeling "lifted from the shadows" the music by the lighthouse family that I was listening to at that moment too. The other little messages I put around the piece of art was "grief can transform" and "Loving yourself heals" and "fly little caged bird"

Almost Finished my Board Book

I did some more work on my wee board book for the Art, Heart & Healing Course.  I did this around October time.  Working on the front cover and the celebration pages.

 

What I've been working on in May

Ive been doing a lot of different stuff this month.  I joined Willowing and have signed up for Tam's free course in Art, Heart and Healing. (This is a four week course and is so brilliant, I highly recommend it).
I'm also taking the Portraits & Petite Dolls course with Suziblu.  These courses are self-guided, so its great that I've plenty time to do them. I've watched all the videos and it is very interesting and I know its taking my art in new directions as is Tam's course.
At the LAA (Livingston Art Association) I've been learning to work from my sketchbook and  I've just finished my first canvas inspired by one of my sketches.  This was a fun progression to watch.

The above was a scanned copy of the canvas when the background was done so I could play with a few ideas.  The drawing of the tree, birds and leaves were first drawn out in glue and then the background was layered using a brayer.  The brayering made the glue very unstable so before the canvas dried, I peeled it off and it acted like a resist, leaving an outline of my drawing which I took as a happy accident.
I was trying for a relief effect but worked with what I got instead.  Once I had the copy I started to play with collage pieces for the birds and ink ideas for the tree and leaves.  I do like some of the outcomes in this painting but decided when I went for it on the canvas for real, to keep exploring and trying out new things.

The Canvas developed. It is called 3 Little Birds, Singing Don't Worry.  I kept the Thorntons foil sweet wrappers for the birds and did some pen work in the wings and leaves, then decided to use an SNP party political newspaper for the tree.  I kept thinking of what the birds message was (as the entire canvas was inspired by the song 3 little birds by Bob Marley). I liked the idea of playing with the contrast of current politics against the message of the song.  Especially since universally our economies are in turmoil.

 

The above two paintings are from an altered book I'm making in Tam's Art, Heart & Healing Course.
The board book is fun and challenging to do.  These were the work for Week Two of the course.
The background for the Dear Little Chelle spread was brayered and then the photos & lettering was printed and then every piece was integrated into the page.
The Friendship & Love was given a watercolour washed background and then the little whimsy dolls were drawn and painted on watercolour paper, cut out and then their dresses and the tree was collaged.
I found lots of little flower embellishments from card making scrap kits and played around with these till I was happy with the layout, finally finishing it off with some stamped lettering.

Following Suzi's portrait class I decided to try out a portrait spread in my sketchbook.  I also played around with some collage pieces for the background and some words from a very old newspaper I had lying around. I had a lot of fun making this sketchbook spread.