I’ve got some more of this design done today. It’s growing quite nicely I think.
I’ve also managed to save the WIP file as the cropped image, like above. So, I’ll have to try to either combine the original drawing with this one, or just work with the square format. Either way would work I think. Maybe. Perhaps.
For now it’s become too warm, too uncomfortable for me to work in my work area, which is upstairs. Time for me to move downstairs to a cooler room until this one cools off somewhat.
Today is set to be one of the hottest days in the UK on record. Here, my weather app tells me it’s 28ºC (that’s 82.4ºF for those who still measure temperature that way). While not hot for some parts of the world, it’s way too hot for me! I’m starting to wilt…badly.
We have a fifty-fifty chance of thunderstorms forecast for early evening and again later in the night. I hope they arrive, with rain to cool things down so I can sleep! So long as it’s not a little rain which then creates high humidity…
Us Brits are very good at talking about (read complaining about) the weather. We have quite changeable weather here on our little islands thanks to the location on the eastern edge of the Atlantic and right where the Gulf Stream can flow along our western edges. It makes for some interesting weather for sure.
No matter what the weather is doing, we find something to moan about it. It’s a national pastime!
Anyways, it’s too hot for me to continue working, even with a fan on, as the Surface Studio is blowing out hot air. The fan is circulating warm air. And being upstairs in a south facing room, it gets rather warm on days like this.
When it cools, I shall return to art, but for now I’m either going to go crochet or read in the cooler environs of my living room
A bit more done on this work today and yesterday evening. As usual my tools are Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Microsoft Surface Pen and Microsoft Surface Studio.
So, how are you today Angela?
I’m tired. EMDR yesterday was very, very emotional and draining. The negative thought I started with was that I’m a failure. That went to I’m never good enough for anyone.
I was getting so emotionally upset (distressed) that my therapist voiced quite a bit of concern about me throughout the process and kind of called it to a halt to do something different, but still working with it all.
At the start of the session it was noted how well I was looking, and my therapist has a feeling she’ll be losing me soon … which is signs I really am making good progress. I also know that’s part of the therapy process, preparing the client for therapy coming to an end…
So, all’s good. I’m emotional today, but there’s that contentedness there, and not a lot of anxiety either.
I’ve had weird dreams overnight, and memories cropping up I thought I’d firmly locked away. They’re all connected to the negative belief, however. So, I suspect processing is still going on.
So onwards I go towards healing and being good enough. More importantly believing I am good enough.
Three years ago I spent time with friends from a school I’d taught at for 27 years. As I look back on my time there it mostly seems a distant memory.
My life has changed in so many ways.
Being self-employed as an artist, illustrator and author is a wonderful thing, it barely feels like work as it is something I love to do for pleasure as well as to contracts. I choose my own workload and what I wish to do for the day.
There’s no appalling attitudes or behaviour to deal with (well rarely).
Healing from CPTSD is continuing, and perhaps the source of so many, many positive changes for me.
Three years ago I wouldn’t have thought I would ever feel content with a really low level of anxiety. I rarely ever go to sleep wishing I wouldn’t wake up. That was a nearly daily occurrence in the several years marking my leaving teaching for good after two huge ‘breakdowns’ where I had nearly broken my mind and my will through struggling in work and with a sharply declining mental and emotional health.
Looking back on my life, my mental and emotional health were never good; it’s always been degrees of how bad they’ve been. The mask of smiling happiness and competence was constructed at an early age. I bought into the lie of that mask and it took my mind and emotions nearly breaking to make me face up to that fact that I had some serious problems mentally and emotionally.
I lost my ability to read. Rather, I lost my ability to make sense, process, and remember what I was reading. I could hear the words in my mind but they may just as well have been in an alien tongue. It’s only in recent months that my ability to read and take in what I’m reading has been returning. It’s still hard work, but I persevere.
For over two years I couldn’t drive past the school where I talked, even in night time. I now can. A sign of healing and progress I think.
Gradually, I’m finding the strength and courage to leave my home more often by myself, not just for appointments but just because I can. It’s slow progress, but it’s happening. I get startled into hyper-vigilance still fairly easy, and panic attacks can ensue and I go into full flight mode back to the safety of my car or home. They seem to happen less often though, but they’re still there.
There are still many things that need healing or strengthening with me. Such as finding the confidence and belief in myself to sell my art and promote it.
I still carry many negative beliefs about myself; they’re like a many headed monster that when one head is slayed another becomes visible that was hidden in the crowd of faces.
However, eventually there will be no place these faces can hide, no places for the negative beliefs to hide, and the end will be in sight.
I will get there. It just takes some time.
Thanks to my fabulous EMDR therapist, I’m improving all the time. Even when what seems like a backwards step at the time seems to result in more forwards movement given enough time.
Yes, in three years my life has changed noticeably, and for the better, I think.
About the art…
The little bit of art above is my newest work in progress (WIP). I couldn’t find my ‘Be Brave’ art yesterday and thought I’d start a new one. Today, ‘Be Brave’ was very obviously in the folder for July’s artwork. I just couldn’t see it for looking!
The swirly bits will be changed on this one. They’re not working out for me the way I hoped they would. I will work it out though.
Of course, I’m using my trifecta of tools – Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Microsoft Surface Studio and Microsoft Surface Pen.
It’s definitely a sampler of patterns, ideas, and playing around with digital techniques.
It is, however, quite an accomplishment – at more than one point along the way I just wanted to give up on it.
Looking at it now, there are parts I’d want to change, such as that ‘waterfall’ of green scales in the bottom centre of the A.
I have learned quite a few things, and put together other stuff too in a simpler way.
I’ve also learned that starting with a sketch may be a good idea in future – a sketch with at least the main beams of the supporting structure and main design elements in place, even if just in outline shape form.
At one point, I’d had an idea about continuing some of the ‘tubes’ to the edge of the canvas, maybe making them appear as if they were diving down into the paper, and popping up along their path, acting like laces holding the crazy A down.
However, I didn’t do that this time. Matching up colours, shading, patterns etc would be a tad awkward and frustrating for me, especially if I just wanted to carry the ‘tube’ on from the edge of the letter.
It is, however, something I can consider trying to do in the future.
Despite me thinking it yesterday, I haven’t left any white space in the letter itself, just leaving the white space around it. I tried, but it just didn’t feel quite right in this particular design.
I have no idea how many hours I’ve spent on this – many tens of hours I would think – with very few frustrations along the way.
I think I have some fish to finish along with the ‘Be Brave’ design I was working on before I wandered off to have a go at this idea for a crazily entangled monogram.
So, between them and work for the next colouring book I have quite a bit of stuff to keep me busy for sure.
All I need to say now is that I used my usual trio of tools – Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Microsoft Surface Pen and Microsoft Surface Studio.
Easy listening playlist on Spotify, creating art. What a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning!
I’ve been working at this monogram now for several days. It is coming along.
It really feels like a an embroidery sampler where the learning embroiderer would try out different patterns and shapes and still create something beautiful.
For me, the sampler is more about out different ideas as they come to me and increasing my knowledge and understanding of the digital art tools available to me in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro.
Of course being able to draw directly on the screen of my Microsoft Surface Studio with a Surface Pen makes creating digital art a dream for me; it’s like working with pens and pencils and so on on paper. However, I’m able to do things I don’t think I’d ever be able to do with traditional media.
I still love working with pen on paper; I currently have one drawing on the go and I may convert it into a digital artwork when it’s done.
Exploring the realms of digital art has opened doors to me that have expanded my creativity in ways I never could have imaged previously.
Yes, I learn by doing myself rather than following tutorials. My experience of watching tutorials is that I end up more confused than I started.
Don’t get me wrong, the ones I watched were excellent. However, they are by people who really know the software and what everything does, and they speak to people who have some idea of it all.
Besides, I want to do art my way, and these artists tend to show how they do things and that often doesn’t make any sense to me.
I’m grateful they share, and one day I may watch some more, but for now the exploration in my own realms of creativity is what is best for me.
As I look at my sampler monogram, I can see how I’m developing my own digital art voice in terms of techniques and effects that suit my style of rather intricate, abstract art based on patterns, curves, swirls and arches, along with a lot of motifs based on nature.
The plain curves in this monogram are adding some much needed scaffolding or girders to support and separate the patterns. Some of the fancily patterned curves are getting lost in the crazy intricacy of adjoining sections.
There are no individual sections that I really don’t like. However, some combinations of sections don’t seem to gel well, at least not to my eye.
What I do love is the layers of diversity of colour and pattern. Each glance reveals something new, whether it’s the way I’ve played with light and shadow, the way patterns look together, or the way colours I’d not normally put together seem to work together.
However, as this is turning out to be a sampler, then that’s fine. It’s all learning for me, and that’s good.
I’ve noticed I’ve not left any white space in this design, so far. I may do that in the area that is left to complete, just to contrast with the pattern-dense areas done so far.
It is a fascinating journey for me, and while this may not be an artwork that I’d offer for sale at redbubble.com or zippi, it’s something that is worth its weight in gold for me in terms of lessons learned and also gaining some confidence in my style of digital art.
I’ve managed to get a bit more of this design done today.
I’m finding I’m enjoying working ‘freeform’ i.e. without a sketch. I’m just adding shapes and patterns that I particularly like and trying out colour combinations that may work well together and alongside others.
Also, I’m finding that the more I work digitally, the more my head is getting around this digital lark.
As usual, my digital tools are Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, a Microsoft Surface Pen along with a Surface Studio.
So Angela, how are you today?
I had a good night’s sleep, sleeping through to nearly 8 am from just before midnight. I felt really upbeat and ticketty boo, once I’d come around. It takes me ages to wake up properly these days and I have no idea when that crept up on me!
All the same, I felt up to some ‘adulting’. Today, that involved posting a couple of packages off and doing some shopping.
I also have to say that I’m quite content, and today I don’t seem to have much anxiety. I noticed yesterday that I kept trying to find it or to make myself anxious so that I could feel it.
When did this happen that the anxiety has not vanished but diminished noticeably.
And here’s me thinking that Monday’s EMDR didn’t have much of an effect …
And that is all I have to say about that today, other than I do have to go and do a bit more ‘adulting’ in the form of cooking a healthy meal. I really fancy a curry … one with lots and lots of veggies!
I’ve got a bit more work done on this entangled monogram. It’s coming along fairly well, though I’m still not at all sure about the colour choices. Mind you, that often happens with me and I persevere and it works out fine at the end.
As usual my trio of digital tools are : Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Microsoft Surface Pen and Microsoft Surface Studio.
So Angela, how are you today?
I’m still really, really tired. I got to bed early-ish (for me). I had weird dreams again. That’s the third night in a row.
I could just go back to bed, but I can’t. I’m taking my sister out for lunch and she’ll be arriving soon.
I’m still content, but there’s a shadow there too. It may be tiredness. It may be the inner critic taking advantage of my tiredness. It may be that sense of deflation after EMDR. Or it could be any combination of these or something else entirely!
What I do know is that I’ll focus on that contented feeling that is there, if a little in the background today.
It’s not that long ago that this kind of tiredness would have me really down in the dumps, sad, miserable, fed up. I’m tired, but my lack of energy is due to tiredness, some of which is emotional tiredness after EMDR. It is taking a while for me to recover this week.
That’s OK though, for recover I will. I’ll soon be full of energy (relatively speaking) once again.
I was looking at the monogram I started a few days back and I’m really not happy with it at the moment. I don’t like the shape of the letter. So, I thought I’d try out a more ‘blocky’ letter. I also thought I’d try filling the letter with abstract patterns and shapes to see how that goes too.
You can see the result of my last two or three hours of work. I like what’s happening here, but I’m not too sure about my colour choices. Time to get limited colour palettes going again I think!
I’m perplexed as to how I can so easily create abstract mandalas that are really quite complex, but something like this seems to cause me no end of troubles.
I will persevere. I always do when it’s art.
As usual, I’m using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro along with a Microsoft Surface Pen and Surface Studio.
So, tell me Angela, how are you today?
I’m tired. I’m content but feeling ‘flat’ at the same time. The ‘flatness’ is draining some of the contentedness away from me today. I don’t feel as ebullient as I did in the last week.
EMDR yesterday was puzzling, confusing and overwhelming. I also think I went with the expectation of the same kind of thing happening as last week.
It didn’t.
Last week, we worked with one negative belief about myself and the image that popped up when I thought of myself as a baby or child while holding that belief and the feelings it generated inside me.
This week I went to therapy with an image of a ‘monster’ that had cropped up this week.
While processing in EMDR, the negative thoughts just kept coming and coming. The pain and sensations in my body were quite overwhelming.
At the end of the session, my therapist said we need to go back to how we’d worked in the last couple of weeks.
I agreed.
I’m so glad that despite the tiredness and flatness, the contentedness is still there, despite me feeling deflated from EMDR yesterday. Me being overly tired isn’t really helping things either.
I left the session feeling tired and I wanted to sleep. I couldn’t, however, as I had a commitment in the evening. That left me more tired. I really haven’t slept enough overnight to overcome the tiredness. It’ll soon be time to nap I think!
However, I did wake up with an idea about what I could do about a monogram, and wanted to explore that.
I also have to remind myself that yesterday in EMDR wasn’t a step backwards. It was finding out that the way to work is with a negative belief, just one, to prevent overwhelming, confusing sessions. Maybe not a lot of processing was done yesterday, but a lesson was learned.
On a positive note, I did some ‘adulting’ yesterday that involved going into a branch of my bank to pay a couple of cheques in and to enquire as to whether I’d received a payment, and to get the online banking thingy sorted it. It won’t let me log on. I can’t log on until I recieve this card reader thingy, but it should be a lot easier to do so in the future – woohoo!
I also had lunch in the park in Neath. Eating while out and about can be a huge problem for me, but yesterday I had the courage to do this again.
So, when I see those two things, I can see how much progress I have made, even though the tiredness and deflation are sapping me of a little bit of positivity today.
It’s only temporary, the tiredness and deflation. A nap could seriously help me out!
This is my way of saying thank you to those who follow my work, particularly the colouring books I have created.
If you’d like to download and colour, you need to be a member of the group and agree to follow the T’s & C’s.
I’m looking forward to seeing what members of the group will do with this one! I love to see the different colour schemes and media that they use to bring the drawing to life with the magic of colour.
To create this template, I started with a sketch on square gridded paper. It was a very basic sketch with just outline shapes, lines and so on. I then scanned it into the Surface Studio and completed this drawing using my Surface Pen along with Autodesk Sketchbook Pro.
I had to include some of my favourite design elements – butterflies, stars, flowers, fungi, seed pods, arches and geometric patterns.
It was fun to draw, even the sketch was as I love to use a Koh-i-Noor Magic pencil to do the sketching with, one that has quite different colours in the lead so that I get a fair rainbow of colours.
I’m warming to sketching things out before drawing them in ink (either traditional ink/pens or digital) to give me a skeleton I can put flesh on in terms of details and patterns.
So Angela Porter, how are you feeling today?
I’m feeling contented. My stomach/digestive system is back to normal. All just in time for today’s EMDR session this afternoon.
That’s all I have to say about that today. I’m sure I’ll have more tomorrow post EMDR.
Another 6 hours work done on ‘Be Brave’ since I posted yesterday.
I rather like the ‘tubes’ arcing off to the top right. I love geometric patterns. I also love playing with light and shadow.
In my home I have quite a few pieces of artwork from my AS and A level art days, some 15 or so years ago now. Three of them are oil paintings. They’re abstract paintings of patterns taken from rusty worm screws from a steam locomotive, some kind of gear thingy from a diesel locomotive (also rusty) and detail from an angel from the tympanum above the door to Malmesbury Abbey. Each one is done in a simple colour palette – magenta, red, orange and yellow for the locomotive parts and blues and white for the Romanesque angel abstract.
I discovered I hated working with oil paints. They’re slimy and messy. I don’t like slimy nor messy (I think that’s why I’ve fallen in love with digital art!).
However, I remember the exhibition where these were show after the AS exam. I recall being puzzled why people were coming up and touching the paintings. So, I asked a friend who’d attended why she had felt my oil paintings.
She said they looked so three-dimensional she had to touch them to see how I’d achieved it and was amazed they were flat.
I hadn’t seen this 3D property of my artwork until someone pointed it out to me. Then, just like magic, I could see what others could see and why they were touching the paintings.
As I worked on the ‘tubes’ I remembered this experience. I know that I don’t see my work as others see it and it can often appear ‘flat’ to me as I know it really is flat! I don’t always see the illusions of depth that I create in my work, illusions I bring out mostly unconsciously as I add colour.
I think this memory cropped up as, like with the oil paintings, I’m working with pure colour – no black lines to outline the design elements.
As you can see, I am using a drawing of mine as the guide, the map for what I will produce in colour.
This is a difference in the way I usually work, that’s for sure.
The amazing mandala I completed a week or so ago now opened the door for this way of working. I did start with an outline drawing for the mandala, and it really was a basic line mandala. It gave me the basic forms and shapes. I then started to go to town on embellishing that basic design.
I discovered I really enjoyed working this way, not least because I realised my digital art skills had progressed enough for me to succeed.
Mandalas are one thing, but working on a drawing like this is a bit different for me. It’s full of self-doubt and worry it’s not going to work out. Because it’s not so symmetrical it requires thinking about what order I complete each design element.
It is, however, turning out ok. And I’m really learning a lot more about my favourite digital brushes, and new ones, and how I can get the effects I want.
I use a Microsoft Surface Pen, Microsoft Surface Studio and Autodesk Sketchbook Pro to create my digital art.
So Angela, how are you today?
I’m feeling content and I can feel a gentle smile inside me and a slight smile on my lips. Yes, I know that sounds weird, but it’s the only way I can describe how I feel today. Also, my digestive system has settled down as well.
Yes, there’s still the background ‘noise’ of anxiety, but it’s not as vociferous as it was just a day or so ago, and one heck of a lot quieter than it was last Monday post-EMDR.
I do have EMDR again tomorrow. The same thing may happen in terms of heightened anxiety and upset digestive system.
I have to say to gain days like today – days where I have that contentedness, that inner gentle smile – are more than worth the days of feeling not so well both physically and emotionally.
Even my bad days are nowhere near as bad as they were in the years leading up to my first serious ‘breakdown’. That is an excellent thing. I am progressing along slowly but surely on my journey to recovery from CPTSD.
Art is the Adventure 