DOODLING THE WAY BACK

Yesterday I checked out Tracey Fletcher King's blog   http://traceyfletcherking.blogspot.co.uk/   for 14th June on "Doing the Lean" - as usual a really interesting post.  I find it difficult to get my creative juices going at the moment, so I decided to adapt Tracey's advice to my own discomfort zone and lean into art by just doodling during yesterday and today.


I picked up some scrap pieces of watercolour paper that already had a background of some kind on them, and sat on the sofa with my Inktense pencils, a water-brush and my favourite children's gel pens, and just let the images produce themselves.

Don't know where this came from - I don't feel sad, at least not on the surface.  Shouldn't let the mind run free, there's no knowing what corners of the mind it will creep into!

No, this is not a key-stoned photo, just an irregularly-shaped off-cut with just a blobby shape at the top left as a starting point.  Doing something like this lets me go into a sort of trance state where I just let the pencils decide what to do.  What does it matter whether it's any good or not - I'm a member of the Messy Book Group and I don't care about things like that any more!

Not everything works, and this purple and yellow one is not my favourite, but I will defend it by saying it's 'different'.  I think that even if we often feel our own work is not good enough, the one thing we can say is that whatever original work we paint, no-one else in the world would paint exactly that in exactly the way we have done.  So we should at least give ourselves points for originality and creativity.

I quite like this green one.  I would have liked to make it much brighter but, given the restrictions of the strong green paint and the colours of the gel pens I had, it is what it is, not what I wanted to make it be.  It took ages but was good for taking the mind on to another plane, and I am fairly pleased with it.

OK, so my side table also held a few collage scraps, scissors and Pritt-stick, and this fishy image created itself.

The next one really is my favourite.  I cut out the clock faces with no idea of what to do with them, and the idea of using them as faces suddenly came to me.

I love the baby girl with her little bib, and the middle sister who obviously takes care of the younger ones, while her two older sisters regard themselves as too old to have anything to do with the little ones.


Very tiring, but altogether enjoyable ..... so I'm not sad like the first lady, I am .....

Bye for now.