Mid-February

Hello again! How are you doing? Have you managed to keep the winter blues away so far? February is probably the worst month for the blues for me and I've noticed that this year has been no exception. The last few weeks I've been struggling with motivation and feeling down, as I'm sure many others have too. We've finally seen some sun the last few days and that's definitely helped!

So... it's time to update you on my progress. The surprising thing for me is that there's been any progress at all with how I've been feeling lately, which is nice! I've been continuing my daily meditations as much as I can and I've added 30 min of cycling (indoors) every other day - time to think about shedding that extra winter weight! There hasn't been as much creative work as I would've liked, or that I even scheduled for, but there has been some movement.

I've also been thinking that while I have all this theoretical education concerning how to use programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, and how to use colour effectively, and how to combine fonts, I don't have a lot of practical experience. So in an effort to correct this, I started researching various tutorials on Illustrator and creating characters and shapes in vector. There are a lot of really good sites out there. I even managed to finish one and I have another planned for this week too!

Let's take a look at my work this past few weeks:

I started a new negative painting in water-colour. It's the same subject as my last one, with orange berries, but I made a colour change by swapping out the violet in the previous painting with phthalo blue. I'm trying to get a feeling of light in this one.

Here you get a better sense of the texture I added with alcohol and water drops when the paint was still wet in the first step. I've started cutting shapes into the piece.

Lots of shape work here. The leaves are coming along nicely I think, but I don't like the group of berries on the bottom-right corner, they look very forced. I'd also like to see more variation in terms of contrast in the whole piece.

The finished piece. I lightened up the edges of the bottom-right corner bunch of berries to send it to the back and be less prominent. I've also added more darks and lifted a few lights for better contrast and did a bit of positive painting to improve the colour of the fruit. I admit that I was very worried that this experiment would turn out anything I liked at several points in the process, and while I'm not sure I completely achieved what I set out to do, I'm still happy with how it turned out!

In the midst of all this painting, I got a card from my sister in the mail and for the first time ever, got the urge to doodle a sort of mandala-type drawing. I only did the flap because I thought that would be more interesting, plus I had to go do other things so couldn't work on it more. I like how "spring" it is!

I found a really sweet tutorial for this little fox done in Illustrator and I just had to try it out! The only trouble I had was with the background texture - I couldn't get the opacity to work the way the tutorial said, no matter what I tried. Still, he's awfully cute isn't he?!

So that's how the past few weeks have gone for me. By the way, if you're interested in trying out the little fox tutorial you can click here to go to it (a new window will open up). It is a beginner project and works well with the lower versions of CS. My next tutorial is on creating vector characters with swappable features. I'm really looking forward to it! I'm a bit stumped for my next painting, so I did a bunch of google searches to see what people have done with negative painting. I created a new board in Pinterest with a bunch of inspiration! Click here if you'd like to have a look.

And that's all for this post! February looks to be leaving like a lamb, so here's hoping March is beautiful! 

Have a good one my friend!

Until next time,

Mandy

If you'd like to see more of my work or keep up with me day-to-day you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook.

If you're interested in commissioning me or working with me for graphic work, click here to be taken to my Contact page to send me an email or message me from my social media links above, I'd be happy to answer any questions :)

Beginning of February: Gosh it's cold!

Hello again! How did January treat you this year? I guess it shouldn't be a surprise, but for me January was a blur! I'm really hoping that February settles down more and I'm taking steps to helping make that happen. This post has a lot of updates: new extra-curricular activities, a completed certificate, mental health, and of course paintings!

Free Time?

A lot of changes have happened this year already in my family, a lot of which you already know about, but my husband and I, in our infinite wisdom and vast storage of free time (wait, what?),  have decided to put our girls into Girl Guides this year. Oh man, what am I thinking?!

I'm actually really pleased with the group, my husband's family grew up with it and his mom is still very active, so there's a lot to say about it. And I'm sure my girls are going to get a lot out of it (and maybe even me too). But when I consider the time commitment for this thing - let's just say there's a great big red hand-print mark on my face from epic face-palm I self-delivered. However...I do think it will be an amazing adventure for the kids and as a mom I really want to give that to them, so...yeah.

Certificate Complete!

In other news! I completed my first Learning Path certificate through Lynda.com (woohoo!)! I just want to say for the record that the courses on Lynda.com are incredible. They took longer to complete than I expected but I was trying to get as much out of them as possible. If you are thinking of signing up for any reason, I recommend giving it a try for a month if you can, I don't think you'll regret it!

So, since I've completed that course-set I'm onto my next set which is all about logo design. I'm very excited about this! I hope to have this course done this week and if everything goes the way I'm thinking it will, then I will start applying for freelance work by mid-February! Very exciting!! Oh, if you have a need for a logo and you're on a tight budget, send me a message. This isn't my first course in logo design, I just want to be better at it.

Gaining Focus

Do you meditate at all? I've come to it off and on over the course of my life so far and I've always enjoyed it. I usually find that when I'm really stressed (when I need it most) is when it drops off my routine and then it takes awhile to get back to it. But now with smart phones and tablets having access to apps galore there's so many more options for guided meditations and just sound meditations!

Just last night I downloaded a meditation with Tibetan bowl chimes. I tried it out this morning and while it isn't perfect, I can't complain for the price (free) and I did feel much calmer and more focused afterward, which was the goal. I truly need the days to stop whooshing past me and I'm thinking that 5 min/day should definitely help!

Painting Practice

I want you to know that I haven't neglected my art at all during all this hurley-burley either. I've been practicing my negative painting as promised and I'm not too dis-satisfied with my results so far. I'm not sure if I will reach my goal of having one finished painting by March, but we'll see. I'm trying to be methodical about this learning because I really want to learn as much as I can about painting in this way. I'm drawn to the way it looks and feels and it's important to me to feel like I've mastered something for once!

Here's my progress so far:

After some online research of other artists and how they
approach negative painting in watercolour, this is what I did.

I wanted to play around with the idea a little so I tried
out this concept. Not entirely sure I pulled it off.

Then I went through my photos and found a tropical fruit tree that
looked promising so I setup a composition and tried out my
knowledge so far. This is a step or two beyond an
underpainting (with some detail starting to take shape).

And this is where I decided to stop for this experiment. I could
have gone further but I didn't want this to be a finished
piece, more of a lesson. I like a lot of what happened here though!

And this is what's on my desk right now. This is an underpainting, with
only a vague placement of colour to give some idea of where I
want to go with the piece. The subject is the same as above, but I
switched out the violet paint for blue and I'm adding more
textural effects with alcohol and water drops.

I'm not sure how this experiment will turn out, but that's part of the fun of it! After I posted my last piece there were a lot of requests for a video tutorial or some sort of demonstration - I'm not sure I'm ready for that just yet but I will keep the idea in mind for the future. For now I will make an effort to post pictures of each stage as I do it so you can get a better idea of what's happening.

And that's all for this post! Thank you for taking the time to sit with me. I hope your next few weeks go well. My birthday is this Friday so I have that to look forward to too!

Have a good one my friend!

Until next time,

Mandy

If you'd like to see more of my work or keep up with me day-to-day you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook.

If you're interested in commissioning me or working with me for graphic work, click here to be taken to my Contact page to send me an email or message me from my social media links above, I'd be happy to answer any questions :)