Tag: art talk

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Art & Craft Musings

When creativity is absent

Art friend, we often see the results of inspiration & creativity online, the darker flip-side seems to not be talked about so often. I’m hoping that sharing the following vulnerable musings will help you not feel so alone when sometimes the inspiration doesn’t come.

The way I approach making art comes from within, and at times it simply doesn’t come. Does that ever happen to you?

When I notice this happening, I feel several things:

  • Pressure. Why can’t I create? Why can’t I be consistent?
  • Guilt. Will people who expect to see my art be disappointed? What if I can’t deliver what I promised?
  • Fear. Will it ever come back? Am I just kidding myself thinking I’m an artist?

I start thinking that maybe I should approach art in the results focussed way. I’m a fairly competent painter; I could paint cute animals or watercolour landscapes or just do crafty things like bookbinding. I could just produce and focus on creating a massive output. But when I sit down to try I can’t. The heaviness comes tenfold, because on some level I know that I am avoiding something.

Recently I noticed something that I do, or maybe something I experience is a better way of putting it. When I’m in a creative period, I feel like I’ve cracked the code, I’ve unlocked something in myself, I’ll never have to worry again about not feeling creative! Then, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly, the feeling disappears and I’m in a creative dry spell. During the dry spell I feel like it will never change. I have run out of ideas, run out of motivation and this is it, the inspiration will never come back.

It’s curious to experience these extremes, especially when my memory tells me that I’ve been through both phases many times, so I can always trust that the current phase doesn’t last forever. It’s as if what I’m experiencing is the immutable Truth and no reasoning or logical thinking changes how I feel. As someone who has used logic to override feelings for the best part of my life, this is simultaneously frustrating and a marker of progress. I’m hoping it will change over time, where I might be able to experience both at the same time.

I wish for a future where I might be able to experience the feelings that I’m currently protecting myself from by not making art (because I do think this avoidance is borne out of self-protection). It also makes me wonder about when to let things rest and be soft to myself or when to push through and force myself to create. I don’t have a definitive answer for what is ‘the right thing’, but I do think ruminating on these questions is useful in and of itself.

Right now I’m trying to listen to little sparks of creativity. They don’t yet translate to actually making art again yet, but it’s little things like seeing someone’s painting and feeling inspired, or feeling excited to try something I’ve seen (a technique or colour combination) or a general feeling of “maybe I’d like to…”. Yesterday I all of a sudden felt that I might want to try an expressive self-portrait.

We’ll see. For now I am going to try to keep listening.

Dear art friend, if this sounds familiar to you, I hope you will be able to find within you a gentleness towards yourself. We’re in this together, figuring out this thing called life & creativity.

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Art & Craft Musings

Letting Go Of The Outcome

I often talk about how great it is if you can let go of the outcome when creating art, but what does that actually mean and how do you do it?

Let’s start with the flipside of letting go: being attached to the outcome. With this comes a feeling of pressure. For example wanting to create pretty or aesthetically pleasing art, creating something that will make you feel good about yourself, or creating in order to get loads of likes & comments (i.e. to feel loved and accepted).

Or even when you take that away, there’s still the issue of how you look at your own work. When you are attached to the outcome there is pressure, whether it comes from yourself or from outside.

At a certain point in my journey I noticed this pressure and realised what it was doing to my process. Instead of enjoying this wonderful art time that I was making for myself (and you’ll agree that in our busy lives, the time you make for art is precious and certainly not a given!), I was feeling icky about it. I might have created paintings I liked or felt good about, but at the same time I was so focussed on creating a certain outcome that I wasn’t able to enjoy the actual creation process.

And when you’re not enjoying the process, why bother? If you have a hobby (something you specifically do because you want to enjoy yourself) and you find yourself not enjoying yourself, then you have to change something. Once I started pondering on that I had the insight that it was about enjoying the process. And how could I enjoy the process? The most important step was to not worry so much about what the result would be.

It’s definitely not easy and it’s a journey, rather than something you simply ‘decide’ and put into practice forever more. Since my discovery I have started incorporating this into my classes. My work and my classes are never about becoming the greatest artist or mastering a certain technique. Rather, I try to help you to embrace the process and let go of the outcome.

When people tell me they’ve enjoyed a class of mine that they’ve taken, it’s rarely about whether they liked the artwork they created. The focus is usually about the process or how it made them feel.

I’ve realised that often people haven’t really discovered yet that there is something additional that you can add to the process. When you let go of the outcome, you can still make art that is satisfying as an end result, but there are also these things you can add so it becomes more transformative.

So it becomes more about self-expression, or self-discovery, or about switching off, or processing your feelings, or journaling something that happened to you that you need to work through (a therapy like process). When you focus only on the outcome, that stands in the way of all of those things. Being conscious of it allows you to be more deliberate in your purpose for doing art. You can start examining what the things are that trip you up, and what those things are that makes it less fun for you.

What my hope and wish is for you that you can bring in a bit of that consciousness that allows you to let go of the outcome and enjoy the process. So at the end of your art session you’ve had a nourishing journey, rather than just a pretty piece to show for it.

So my question and challenge to you is: What can you do in your process, next time you sit down to make art, to focus a little bit less on the outcome?

PS if you enjoyed this article you might like to check out Life Book 2019, an online art course that I’m teaching on which is all about making art and how the process can help you live a more positive and fulfilling life. Use coupon code LOVEBOMB2019 to get 20% off

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Art & Craft Musings

Art For Self-Expression And Why It’s Different

I often talk about doing art for self-expression and I’m aware it can sound a bit intangible. What does that mean, art for self-expression?

For me it is the crux of why I do art and what I want to put out into the world: to help people do art for self-expression rather than for result.

In our education system you’re often learning by doing a project or mastering a technique. The media we see online is usually of an end product, not necessarily the journey. That can give you a skewed view of what art can be. It all feels very results focussed.

It can be really difficult, because we are so focussed on results in our lives, education and careers. We are often concerned with the end of the journey and how to get there efficiently and quickly, rather than the journey itself. Of course there is nothing wrong with knowing what you want and going for it, like wanting to make beautiful or pretty art. I love making art where I enjoy the result. But if that is all there is, we’re missing out on a big part of what art can offer.

Recently there has been a shift:

It’s becoming more popular to talk about mindfulness, the journey, being in the moment

What I like to do with art for self-expression is for it to have less focus on the result. This has been the red thread through my journey: moving from a more results focussed artistic practice to a more self-expressive artistic practice.

And I have good news! In this process there is no bad art, but there is also no good art. That concept of bad or good art can really hold you back. With self-expression it is no longer about bad or good, but it’s about you. It’s important to remember that it’s a process and a journey. Once you’ve decided to make art for self-expression you might be surprised when you still encounter your inner critic or still feel very attached to the outcome. It’s good to start with the intellectual understanding that you can only ever make the art that you’re meant to make.

You are always expressing that which you need to express in the moment.

It’s important to be mindful of what being creative during the natural phases of your daily life is like. Sometimes you are on fire and everything comes easily, and other times all the energy has gone out of you like a mini burnout. I believe this is a normal part of life, but sometimes it can feel like it’s not fine. As if you’re ‘doing it wrong’ and you have to be ‘on’ and creative all the time. Sometimes you feel in the flow and make amazing art and the next day it doesn’t feel good. That’s part of the process. It requires courage to allow that to be part of the process and not get discouraged.

I really value what art can bring you if you focus on the process and the self-expression.

The beautiful thing is that doing art this way doesn’t require any specific skills or expensive art supplies.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. It can become a really nice part of your life where you are supporting yourself with your art. Instead of doing art to create something pretty or fixed, it’s about connecting with what you need to express. Sometimes that’s heavy and difficult, sometimes it’s light, but in my eyes it’s always perfect.

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Art & Craft Musings

My Story and Why I Do What I Do

My Story and why I do what I do

You see my art as a finished thing but it comes from somewhere. It is part of my story, my past and my journey.

My story with creativity goes back a long way, I’ve always been attracted to being creative, painting, writing stories. But in the past I felt held back, usually by fear of failure or due to a harsh inner critic.

The seed of creativity was there all along, but it wasn’t a straight line to where I am now.

altered board book with colourful art journaling showing a feminine face with eyes closed

I stumbled upon mixed media in 2008 and really wanted to do it but couldn’t stick with it. I’d make a good effort, but hate the result and then not create for months. I kept buying more and more art supplies thinking they were the key to creativity, but none of them were the magical solution I was looking for. I got stuck.

A few years later I was really struggling with depression (something I have experienced on and off my whole life). Getting help through therapy led me on a journey of self-discovery which wasn’t necessarily about creativity initially.

When I picked up art again around 2014 initially I just wanted to make something pretty. I enjoyed what other people were doing and I wanted to do that too. I followed a lot of art courses and experimented taking on other people’s styles.

At that point in time art & creativity were separate from self-discovery, but then through the therapy slowly art became something natural to reach for as an extension of what therapy was helping me uncover.

Therapy and art started to meet (even if they were separate in terms of place and practice). I realised they were the same, they could serve the same purpose.

The way I grew up there wasn’t much room for my feelings. Showing or experiencing feelings wasn’t modelled. I grew up not knowing or understanding or expressing my feelings. Which then turned into adult me who couldn’t do anything with feelings. But I had an inkling, I realised I was struggling with things and that there was a bigger range of feelings ‘out there’ (or rather ‘in here’).

That is how I came towards using art for self-expression and also for self-discovery.  The art started informing me about what I felt. The art allowed me to see what I felt unable to feel to initially create an intellectual understanding, and over time also an emotional understanding.

Now that I’ve been doing art for self-expression for a while and also therapy, it is becoming easier. Both the making of the art but also understanding and feeling my feelings.

I credit both therapy and art with helping me so much with my feelings. They go hand in hand.

I’m still on this journey of self-discovery and I’m not done (I mean, are we ever done?).  I feel like I have a relationship with art now which is a mirroring of my relationship with my feelings. I can’t walk away from that, nor would I want to.

Coming from no feelings and being on this journey towards feelings is something that goes into my art. This is why you see a lot of graphic expression in my art and a lot of darkness. They might be current feelings, but I also often say that the art I make now is the art I would’ve made when I was a teenager if I had only known how.

board book with colourful art journaling showing three feminine whimsical faces

The expressive art I make is not necessarily a conscious action where I ‘sit down to work through a certain feeling’. Rather, I sit down, make art, try to let things flow and then afterwards (sometimes a few days later) I might look at it and try to understand what feelings I expressed in a piece. It gives me an entry point into my feelings and understanding myself that might be completely opaque to me without art.

This is also why I love working in journals. It’s really a personal practice, like diary keeping, but in a visual way rather than with words.

I try to be kind to myself. My work doesn’t always need to have meaning, it can just be. I can close the book and be happy I made something. I don’t need to be some therapy miracle.

Art helps me with my feelings. I do what I do because I want other people who feel they don’t have a voice for what they feel or don’t have understanding of their feelings to know that art and self-expression can be so helpful with that. Especially in this world that seems to shoo away feelings.

I want to be a voice in the world that says: “yes have all your feelings and express them”.

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Art & Craft Tutorials, Guides & Advice

My Favourite Art Supplies – part 2

Ahhh it’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for… I reveal more of my favourite art supplies! Keep reading to find out which art supplies I use on a daily basis. Don’t forget to check out part 1 over here.

Acrylic Ink

I love me some drippy drippy ink. These Liquitex ones are very nice and vibrant. I use them for drips, but also to add inky layers to my paintings. Inks to me are one of those really FUN supplies to have, even though I haven’t the faintest clue how you’re ‘supposed’ to use them, so I just do my own thing. How do you use your inks?

Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold

This paint colour is magical! In the tube it looks like a simple reddish brown, but when you apply it you realise how versatile it is. Especially when used in translucent layers or added to white, it really shows it’s magic. It just adds a warmth and pretties everything up, or grunges things up, depending on what you’re going for. It’s mega expensive but well worth the money.

Catalyst Wedges

Art teacher Pauline Agnew introduced me to these awesome tools. They are basically silicone wedges that you can use to apply or scrape paint. They have a different feel to palette knives and are really unique and versatile. They are simply one more tool in my toolbox to apply paint, create texture, make backgrounds and grungify (this is a word, I say so) my work.

Palette Knife

I spent years not understanding what palette knives were for (apart from taking paint out of paint tubs effectively), then I started working with them and wow, I’m in love! You can scrape and drag paint with them and they instantly give it a grungy and raw look. Scraping paint with a palette knife is one of my favourite things to do in my artwork and it fits in so well with the feelings I’m wishing to convey. I especially like this metal one, plastic ones are a good budget alternative, but a metal one does work more effectively.

Fluorescent Pencils

These chunky neon pencils are my favourites! I love adding details to my art journal pages with them. They really have that fluorescent look. They come in more colours, but these are the only ones I use

So tell me, which art supplies can’t you live without?

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Art & Craft Tutorials, Guides & Advice

My Favourite Art Supplies – part 1

I love art supplies, I’m a real art supply addict! I often get questions about what supplies I use and love, so I thought it would be fun to create a couple of blog posts highlighting my favourite art supplies.

Brayers

I love my brayer! I have a few different ones. The one pictured is a Speedball brayer which is nice and soft and is my favourite. I also use lino print brayers which are more firm (but cheaper!). I use brayers to apply paint to backgrounds. It’s an instant gratification texture tool and my work wouldn’t be the same without it.

Watercolours

When I first got my watercolours I went through a watercolour phase. Then I realised I could use them in mixed media. Now my favourite way of using watercolours is on top of layers of acrylic. I put together my own palette of Schmincke half pans and a couple of Daniel Smith (shown here is a 12 half pan palette with the colours I use most often)

Pencil Sharpener

I know this seems like the most pointless (harhardehar, see what I did there?) item, but I recently bought a new pencil sharpener and it’s the best thing since sliced bread (slice… get it.. get it?? *bows* I’ll be here all day). It made me realise how incredibly BLUNT my old one was and in addition this little Stabilo sharpener works slightly differently to regular pencil sharpeners. It can achieve a REALLY sharp point and also sharpens more akin to how pencils come when you buy them (the wood of the sharpened bit comes out shorter than with other sharpeners). So yes, I am a real art supply nerd!

Hand Carved Mini Stamps

I’m not a huge crafter, but I do love using crafts to support my art habits. These are some mini stamps (they measure about 2x2cm) that I carved myself. I wanted stamps with certain symbols that I use in my art a lot, and because they are personal symbols I obviously couldn’t buy them from a shop! I used Speedball Speedycarve which is much softer and easy to cut than traditional lino or erasers. This is essential to me as I suffer from RSI very easily.

Chalk Paint

I love matte paints both from a practical point of view as an art journaler (less chance of pages sticking together) and from an aesthetic point of view (pretty!). Paper Artsy make a great range of chalk paints. My favourite colour is Nougat, but I couldn’t get it at my local store, so I got Chalk instead and added a tiny bit of pink and ochre to achieve a warmer/offwhite colour. Whenever you see big areas of off-white in my art, you can bet it’s this chalk paint. I just wish it came in a big tub!

Colour Brush Pen

This is a funny one. I used a tester pen at the shop and got wonderful black lines. But ín the one I bought the ink doesn’t really flow properly. At first I thought about taking it back and getting a refund, but then I realised that the dry brush and grungy effect it created was perfect!

Tell me in the comments below what YOUR favourite art supplies are and how you use them?

And remember to check back soon for part 2!

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Art & Craft Musings

Sometimes Being Interested Is Enough

Often when people post their art in the communities I’m part of they follow it up with ‘but I’m not a real artist’ or ‘but it’s just my hobby’. As if there is some kind of division between ‘real artists’ who can post their art without caveat and ‘not real artists’ who need to qualify it before posting (because otherwise what..?).

This might have something to do with someone’s personal level of confidence or the way society views art, or a combination of both. I definitely identify with this tendency, this wish to let people know you don’t want them to judge you too harshly or to let them know you’re not full of yourself. This desperate wish to take a bit of that huge vulnerability out of creating or sharing something so personal as your own art.

It also might even stop you from creating in the first place. That feeling of not being good enough or not qualified enough. Why should you do it if there are so many other people who might do it better?

A couple of weeks back I went to NineWorlds (it is an inclusive geek convention, it’s amazing!) and I put myself forward to speak on a panel about problematic issues in the work of Joss Whedon. As a self-professed Whedonite (I wrote my undergrad thesis on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) I’m semi qualified to speak on this subject.

Nineworlds Panel

But I worried. What if I didn’t know enough? What if I wasn’t good enough or couldn’t contribute? What if my knowledge was too niche (e.g. just about BtVS instead of all of Whedon’s work)? What if other people knew way more about the subject? What if people from the audience looked at me and thought ‘pfft what is she doing on that panel’?

I discussed these fears with my therapist and he suggested:

What if simply being interested is enough?

This actually touches on something that I read in Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly (I mentioned this book in my previous post) in which she proposes a culture of ‘enough’. That instead of trying to be perfect, we should simply try to be engaged.

When you feel passionate, interested and excited about what you do, it doesn’t matter whether people like it, because the right people will respond to your engagement. When you downplay something, you are giving people a signal that it’s unlikely to be interesting to them, because they will simply mirror your own (lack of) enthusiasm.

This is what I try to do now with my art. I try and move away from the questions of ‘is it good enough?’ or ‘will people like it?’ and instead I try to move towards ‘is this interesting to me?’ and ‘does this make me feel excited?’.

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Art & Craft Musings

It Looks Like I Know What I’m Doing (or a rant on vulnerability)

Know-What-Im-Doing

I love that when I post my art it looks like I know what I’m doing. Because really people, I haven’t the faintest idea. I just keep on doing it, no real goal apart from to just express myself and follow the joy and sometimes my hands all of a sudden produce things I like. I often don’t even notice while I’m working. My head starts going towards not-good-enough-itis. It’s only at the end when I stand back and take a picture of it that I might realise it looks halfway decent and that it might come across that I actually know what I’m doing and all of this is deliberate.

Well, it really isn’t.

This isn’t some kind of humble brag. I want to share what it feels like as a vulnerable flawed human being who is on a journey of self-development and artistic development and who most of the time is just wandering or ambling or lost. Because I think you might be too, and if you are, I want you to see the real me.

I often think people might get the impression that my art is very deliberate, that I know what I want and how to achieve it. That I’ve got it all figured out or that I’m “so talented”. Talent’s lovely (I am not sure I have it, opinions differ) but it has fuck all to do with actually creating art. (If you’ve called me talented before, please keep doing it, it’s lovely and I don’t take offense, but if you think you need to be talented to make art… well then just stop right there. Stop thinking that I mean, don’t stop making art, START making art).

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I’m currently reading Daring Greatly by Brené Brown (I absolutely recommend it, go get it right now!) and it made me realise that painting, or any act of creativity really, is such a vulnerable act. I don’t even mean sharing art, that’s also a vulnerable act, but it’s between you and other people. No I mean the act of creating where there was nothing. It’s a vulnerable act between you and yourself, nothing can make you feel as exposed as creating and expressing. And that leap, that start from nothing to something, that is the biggest most enormous leap.

So many people won’t make that leap, because it can make you shit your pants and want to hide in a safe hidey corner where you can pretend that you can avoid feeling vulnerable. And every day people do make that leap. Your favourite painters, your favourite teachers, your favourite writers. And people you don’t know and have never heard of, they make that leap too.

I make that leap, and you can make that leap. It’s the doing that counts. It’s the showing up. It’s being open and vulnerable, because that is the strength you need to draw from to let yourself be creative.

Go forth! Create!

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Art & Craft Musings

How To Push Past Resistance?

How to push past resistance? And what is resistance anyway??

First let me start off by stating that I LOVE the art I’ve been doing recently. It seems like a barrier (probably self-imposed) has been lifted. I used to feel like every piece I did had to be different and original otherwise I was somehow failing (ridic, right?). Now I feel I’m able to follow my favourite steps and techniques and work with limited supplies to create a cohesive body of work over the course of a few weeks/months and hone my skills (and HAVE FUN! So important).

BUT, and this is the big BUT… although I feel I’m developing, I don’t feel like I’m pushing myself to fulfilling my potential. I have this (not so secret) wish to make more technically accomplished and complex art. Not just that, but art with feeling, expression and emotion, art that comes from deep inside.

There are a few artists I really admire (e.g. Renata Loree, Ivy Newport, Robin Laws) whose art possesses a wealth of soul and complexity. Now I know it’s no use to compare my own work to other people’s work, that’s a given. But I am struggling with not knowing whether it’s a style I WANT to pursue myself or simply like looking at because it pleases me aesthetically. You can enjoy good food without actually being a master chef yourself if you get what I’m saying.

So the first question is really: IS this resistance or not? Am I painting simple quick art journal pages because that’s my deepest desire and what I need to be doing right now, or because I am afraid of going deeper, more detailed and spending more time…?

This has been a theme in my life for as long as I can remember. I find it hard to invest time. I rush through things, wish they were finished before even starting and I find it very hard to stay with them. Hence art journaling and small simple paintings fitting in really well with this tendency. But then how do I ever get to the point where I can invest? Invest time and attention to myself, my art, without wishing to rush through it? And if I engage in this exercise (for example working on a painting that takes days or weeks to complete, not hours) how do I get past that feeling of unease, that feeling of not enjoying myself or not knowing what to do or where things will go? (Aha it becomes apparent to me yet again that I like being in control… hilarious right for someone who teaches people to let go of the outcome..? *gigglesnort*)

I want more out of my art, but I want more with grace & ease, not discomfort or unease. Am I asking too much?

I’m not sure if I can know the answers to these questions right now, but I know I feel a certain excitement. The excitement of my own potential. The gift I can give myself of time, of knowing that I’m allowed to wonder, allowed to find out, allowed to try. All my life I’ve lived with a feeling of ‘I must’, so I’m experimenting with the notion of ‘I am allowed’ and go from there.

This is a piece I did a few months ago in which I feel I captured a little bit of what I’m talking about (even though this was still definitely a quick piece)

Portrait in art journal by Iris Fritschi-Cussens

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Art & Craft Ideas, Sketches & WIP Musings

I Can’t Draw

If I had a penny for every time I heard someone say “I can’t draw” or “I can’t even draw a stick figure”…. I’d have a fair amount of pennies.

I can’t draw either. Or couldn’t. I don’t know. At some point I couldn’t draw. And now I’m at a different stage of ‘can’t draw’. And in a few years’ time I will be further progressed on my journey of ‘can’t draw’. I don’t suppose I will ever get to a point where I exclaim: By golly! I can draw!

I think it’s like that with any skill that has a lot of levels of proficiency. You’re always learning, but you’re never ‘there’, because as soon as you’re ‘there’, there’s another level to achieve. Deep, no?

So. ‘Not being able to draw’ is no excuse not to draw. By all means, don’t draw if you don’t want to or don’t like to. But don’t lament ‘oooooh I can’t draw…….’ as if other people who do draw are somehow born with some magical talent that makes them able to draw. Or as if you’re only allowed to draw if you’re somehow already good at it before having even practiced.

We all can’t draw. We all can draw. I don’t know. Go draw! Draw me a stick figure and go share it with me on Facebook or Instagram =p

PS here are some pictures of me practicing my drawing skills and a bonus picture of a flamingo I drew over 10 years ago. You’re welcome.

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2005-05-27flamingo