Out of sorts art…

I’ve been feeling out of sorts for the last day or so. It’s gradually intensified. A broken night’s sleep really hasn’t helped. House freezing cold (deliberately so!), Angela boiling hot in waves (not illness, just age).

I did draw in the darkest parts of the night when I couldn’t sleep, but what I produced was just a reflection of my ‘out of sorts’ mood. I added words and reflections to the drawings to try to elucidate where this has come from. And then that went to how I could use art in a journal, could I create journal pages, little areas for thoughts/words of meaning, and so on. So I jotted those ideas down.

The larger drawings I was doing in the night just overwhelmed me. The more work I did, the more overwhelmed and dissatisfied I felt. So, in an attempt to create some art that would soothe rather than disturb, I decided to create some small pieces of art and some borders seemed the right thing to do. This quartet of drawings is the result of that solution I sought to help me with my mood and my attitude to my efforts at drawing.

Borders

This morning I’ve focused on work for my next Creative Haven coloring book and I wanted to create some borders I could use for the templates.

These are all approx 2cm (about ¾”) wide. When I was colouring templates for Entangled Gardens, I realised how much I enjoyed not only colouring the border but the finished feel it gave to the templates.

So, I want to build up a library of ready-to-go borders.

Some are organic, others geometric. Some more ornate than others. they are all devoid of any guide as to shadow as that then leaves it entirely up to the colorist how they approach the template.

A nice, if different, way to start the day.