Saturday just gone marked 30 weeks of my pregnancy! So over the past few months and the coming few weeks I’m seeing a lot of friends to catch up before ‘my life is over’ (as I’ve patronisingly been told by some people). It’s both scary and exciting to think that it’s not much longer to wait now. We’re doing a lot of preparations at the moment, mostly in the form of buying stuff. We still need to get a car seat and the carrycot attachment for our pushchair. Other than that it’s just a ton of small stuff we need. We’re also starting antenatal classes at the end of this month. We’ve signed up for the NCT courses and I look forward to meeting other couples in our area.

I’ve been fairly productive with art lately. I don’t know if it’s the pregnancy that’s inspiring me or maybe the feeling of spring which is always a positive time of year. When it comes to creating art it’s the mental obstacles that stand in my way the most (I am not good enough, my art is not pretty enough, it doesn’t look as good as x/y/z artist’s work, I don’t create as much as others so mine isn’t ‘valid’ somehow etc, the list goes on for a looooong time!). I can’t say I have found a specific way of battling these demons, but I am feeling slightly more confident lately and am really trying to tell myself that doing ANY art is all part of the process, whether I like the piece I end up with or not.

Pregnant Princess – I’d had the idea for doing a whimsy pregnancy painting floating around in my head for a while. After doing Bird in a Cage which had very dark colours, I wanted to do something with light and cheery colours. We’ve been working on our baby’s room and I wanted to make something that could possibly go up on the wall in there. I am quite pleased with how the piece turned out overall. I always find it scary to paint a face because I never feel like I have a lot of fine control over the expression, but it turned out OK (although quite different from the sketch I was working from!). I also like the colours and the textures.

Walking My Elephant – I actually don’t like this one particularly. I felt good about it when it was still a sketch, but then I started with the colour and stuff went wrong (the black outlines smudged around her mouth and I didn’t end up being able to fix it properly). Ironically I’ve had some comments from people that they like it and they think it’s cute. That just goes to show! I guess I like the concept but too much went wrong with the execution so it just left me with a bad feeling that I can’t seem to shake.

I Am Already Authentic – This one I like, both because of what it looks like and what it represents. This is an art journal spread that is the week 1 assignment of Tam’s free Art, Heart & Healing course. The aim of the assignment was to listen to my inner critical voice and write down all my self-criticisms and doubts. Then I gessoed over the words as a symbolic letting go. The next part was to paint a ‘self portrait’ and turn the criticisms into one positive statement (coming from the point of view that the critical self is only trying to protect us, albeit going about it in a negative and self-destructive way!).

For me the main theme that came out of this exercise is around not feeling authentic or special as I am, and always feeling like I have to be more like other people in order to be liked or loved or noticed. It’s a constant struggle as intellectually I know I am authentic and special and have my own unique message to impart, but I find it very hard to really feel and believe that as well. It is one of the many reasons I find it hard to create art and update my blog regularly as well! I often can’t imagine why anyone could possibly be interested in me or what I have to say. I am not saying that in a self-deprecating ‘pity me’ way by the way, I am just trying to illustrate some of my personal struggles around self-worth and authenticity.

Hint Of A Smile – A while back I did a workshop at Blade Rubber Stamps to learn how to make your own Japanese Stab Bound Journal. It was a fun class and at the end we took home our own album that we made during the class. I think it has about 15 pages in it with nice high quality paper (not watercolour paper but it’s fairly thick and very nice for art journalling on). This piece is on the first page of the album. It’s so nice to work in an album I created myself from scratch! Really adds to the feeling of ownership and pride. I am also very pleased with this page. I felt confident and in control about the face and I like the colours and level of complexity in the background.

The plan is to put these 35mm slides (that I painted and put little hearts and flowers on) in a row at the top and bottom of the painting.

Any suggestions on making the background more interesting/textured are welcome!