seed pods

Happy Birthday Brett – all coloured

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Happy Birthday Brett © Angela Porter 2019 Artwyrd.com
Happy Birthday Brett © Angela Porter 2019 Artwyrd.com

I finally got round to finishing colouring the Happy Birthday coloring template I created for Brett, the lovely person who runs the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group.

I drew the design on Winsor and Newton Bristol Board using Unipin pens and then I’ve added colour digitally, as well as a rose gold coloured and textured background.

I chose pink as a fairly dominant colour as Brett loves pink so much.

Oh, to colour I used Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Microsoft Surface Pen and Microsoft Surface Studio.

So Angela, how have you been?

I’ve been quiet on social media over the past few days. I’ve needed some quiet time to myself, which has involved an awful lot of crocheting. I’ve not even done anything much that has been arty either.

The reason for this is that I’ve not been feeling all that well. Nothing serious. just not well. I had a migraine on Sunday that took all day to go and left me exhausted.

Also, I’ve not been feeling right in my digestive system/stomach for a few days. This happens on a fairly regular basis (monthly) but this time it was rather unpleasant.

Last night, it hit new highs as I woke hot, sweaty, nauseous and headachy. Thank goodness it was rather chilly here in the UK and I had the windows open. The cool air was pleasant as I lay uncovered. It all passed eventually without me being sick, however I still feel yeuchy today and very, very tired.

Yesterday I had EMDR and that was an interesting session that left me rather tired later in the day. Another inner child made their presence known and I had help to communicate with them, which was so much easier after last weeks session. This child was all to do with loud voices, arguing voices and being startled and upset by them. So, we did some EMDR work with the emotions that came up from that child. A lot of body work was being done with pains around my body as the trauma was being processed with EMDR. Also, lots of memories of raised voices, harsh voices, argumentative voices…and just noisy environments.

I’ve known for a long while that I can be triggered into startle or panic mode when I hear a sudden loud voice or noise around me. I try to remember to take noise cancelling headphones or earphones with me so I can listen to music and not hear such sounds when I’m out and about, especially when I’m feeling rather fragile.

Saturday I flinched and became a bit panicked as I was talking to someone while waiting for a meeting outside a building in my local town. Sunday evening someone spoke quite harshly to me. I don’t think they realised it, but the response in me was one of upset and to withdraw from the situation, permanently.

So, we work with this in EMDR to heal those traumatised parts of me represented by these children.

Hmm, I wonder if these different aspects of me from times when I’ve been traumatised are coming forward so easily because I have so few concrete memories of events.

Either way, as crazy as it may seem to you, it seems to be helping me, and that is all that matters as far as I’m concerned.

“Inspiration” WIP

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Inspiration WIP ©Angela Porter 2019 - Artwyrd.com
Inspiration WIP ©Angela Porter 2019 – Artwyrd.com

I’ve started colouring “Inspiration”, the drawing I completed yesterday.

The drawing was done with a Tombow Fudenosuke and a Lamy medium fountain pen on Winsor and Newton Bristol Board. I’m colouring it digitally using my favourite trio of Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Microsoft Surface Pen and Microsoft Surface Studio.

So far, I’ve spent 3 hours colouring, so it’s going to take me a while longer to complete.

To be honest, it would be a lot quicker to colour using Chameleon markers or other traditional media. Weird, when computers make doing other tasks so much quicker and easier.

That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy adding colour. I mean, I could do that a lot quicker if I chose to use gradient fills. However, this time I wanted to add colour as if I was using traditional media, being able to follow the shapes of the design more closely, having more control over where I add shadows and highlights.

So, I’ll take the time over this one, like I do with many of my artworks.

So, how are you today Angela?

EMDR yesterday was a little different. We didn’t do any EMDR but we worked with my inner child on helping her to heal from past traumas.

I felt silly and daft initially. I didn’t have a clue what I was being asked to do, but my therapist guided me through the process, and eventually I relaxed a little and tried.

I was surprised. Emotional too. It’s not something that I’m comfortable sharing other than in general.

After EMDR I spent sometime in a Starbucks drinking tea, eating a piece of chocolate truffle cake and drawing. Partly this was to wait out the rush hour, mostly it was to give myself a treat after sticking with a therapy session that seemed silly and turned out to be an emotional, insightful and helpful process.

So, the healing journey from CPTSD continues, taking an unexpected turn.

Yesterday, as the sun came out as the day waned my mood brightened a little from just about content to a little more on the happy side. Today I’m a bit tired after a broken night’s sleep with weird dreams but I’m quite content.

Inspiration – Entangled drawing

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Inspiration © Angela Porter 2019 - Artwyrd.com
Inspiration © Angela Porter 2019 – Artwyrd.com

My morning task, afore heading out for my EMDR session later, was to finish this drawing.

I used a combination of a Tombow Fudenosuke pen along with a medium nib Lamy fountain pen on Winsor and Newton Bristol Board, A4 in size, to draw this design and add the hand lettering.

The white space really helps to break up the intricate details; helps to separate out the sections and gives the eyes and brain a bit of a rest from it.

I will add colour to this in the fullness of time, most probably digitally.

So, how are you today Angela?

I’m content. Not quite as smiley happy as yesterday, but content. Calm too, or relatively so. There’s a low level background noise of anxiety there.

I do wonder if the weather affects my moods more than I thought it did. Yesterday was both sunny and rainy – rather heavy spells of rain. The sun and driving in the sun was lovely and helped to lift my spirits somewhat.

Today there’s no sun. Just grey clouds and there’s been rain. I’m not quite as tickettyboo as yesterday.

I think I may need to add a weather tracker to my BuJo alongside my mood tracker to see if there is a correlation.

I have my EMDR session in a couple of hours time. I have no idea how that will affect me at this point in time, nor what memory we’ll work on. I won’t dwell or ruminate on it for now. Just get myself sorted to make the hour-long journey to Neath in a little while. Yes, I think that’s best for now.

“I can do this” – finished drawing

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"I can do this" finished drawing © Angela Porter 2019 - Artwyrd.com
“I can do this” finished drawing © Angela Porter 2019 – Artwyrd.com

Drawing finished

I have, finally, finished this particular drawing. I managed to keep to my challenge of leaving some white space in the design. I did let the design spill over the pencil guidelines I’d drawn for the size of artwork. I then digitally trimmed it within those lines before applying the black and white borders. I do like to define the space within which my drawings and designs reside, that’s for sure. It’s like a window into my imagination, my mind, my intuitive creativity, how all the little things I have observed and imagine just blend and meld into a crazily layered, intricately pattern and yet flowing design that is always quite pretty.

You can’t have too much pretty patterns in this world I think.

I think it’s too detailed and fussy as a coloring template, though I may add some colour to it at some point in time. Before I think about doing that, though, I have an idea for another drawing with some hand lettering on it.

The drawing is a little less than A4 in size (US letter). It has been drawn with Tombow Fudenosuke and Uniball Unipin pens on Winsor and Newton Bristol Board.

My mental and emotional health

Monday I spent mostly in tears after the busy week and the emotional upsets of Sunday. In therapy we just talked about what happened and how I was feeling and thinking about myself and that I need to be a lot kinder to and caring of myself. It was also suggested I need to be a lot more accepting of where I am on my healing journey and not beat myself up for not being able to get out and about much by myself, even when I may want to.

I came home and slept until 2am, then went back to sleep a couple of hours later and slept through until mid morning yesterday, which was then followed by a very quiet day at home crocheting and drawing before yet another nap in the afternoon.

I slept for many hours last night too, and I’m still feeling exhausted. With exhaustion I am emotionally fragile and vulnerable too.

So, much of today will be spent quietly. I do have to head up to Hereford this evening, however. I’m debating whether to go a little early so I can spend a little time at Kilpeck church – my favourite church in the whole wide world. A tiny two celled Romanesque church, almost untouched by time. I’ll see how I feel as the day progresses and whether I manage to find a little oompf. After all, the church has been there for nearly one thousand years, I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere soon!

Monogram I – 13/05/19

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Monogram I © Angela Porter 2019 – Artwyrd.com

Tombow Fudenosuke and Uniball Unipin pens on Bristol Board.

Approx 6″ x 6″ (15cm x 15cm) in size.

I think this one is my favourite so far. I feel almost like I’m finding my feet with them. I suppose time will tell with that though, like everything I guess.

Entangled-day Saturday

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Entangled 11 May 2019 © Angela Porter, Artwyrd.com
Entangled 11 May 2019 © Angela Porter, Artwyrd.com

It’s been a funny kind of day today. I’ve been quietly busy with art, as well as tidying up my home and dyson-ing and so on. My sister and niece are visiting soon for a ‘chip night’, which essentially involves them picking up some chips from a local fish and chip shop, coming to mine to eat and chat and catch up on life for a couple of hours.

In between I’ve managed to draw this little design, and it is little being approx 15cm x15cm (approx 6″ x 6″). Drawn using Unipin and Tombow Fudenosuke pens on bristol board. I then added the shading digitally. I may go on to add some colour at a later time.

Entangled Art 9 May 2019

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Entangled Art © Angela Porter 2019 Artwyrd.com
Entangled Art © Angela Porter 2019 Artwyrd.com

I’ve had a busy couple of days this week. This busy-ness has meant I’ve not been able to do as much drawing as I’d like. So, it’s taken nearly 4 days for me to complete this drawing.

I included, unusually, some hand lettering, and a lot of the patterns have been influenced by images of cells and other things under the microscope. That’s the scientist in me creeping out!

It really needs shading and/or colour to bring it to life. So, I’ll add it to the pile that need the same!

The design is nearly A4 in size (approx. letter size in the US). I drew it with Tombow Fudenosuke, Uniball Unipin and Sakura Pigma Sensei pens on bristol board from Seawhite.

Just a little reminder, but I did an interview for Tony Eames of nfreads.com. You can read it by clicking here.

Hidden letter?

Angela PorterLeave a comment
Hidden letter? ©Angela Porter 2019 - Artwyrd.com
Hidden letter? ©Angela Porter 2019 – Artwyrd.com

I spent some time drawing this design yesterday (around 4 hours) and didn’t finish it. This morning I woke up wondering if I could tuck a letter away in the design, making it part of the design rather than putting the design around the letter, kind of.

So, I looked at the small-ish space I had left to the right of the design and managed to, rather clumsily, tuck a capital A in amongst the design.

The A is a bit more obvious than I’d wanted, but I worked with what I’d already done to see how it could work, or how I’d mess it up and learn from it.

Yes, I know, another A. There are letters of the alphabet I’ve never either done as a monogram or used in a design of some kind.

I quite like the idea of adding letters as part of the design, either as one occurrence of the letter or by creating a motif of some kind that contains the letter which can then be repeated as part of the overall design.

My mind is ticking over on this one…I definitely need at least one more, if not several more, cuppas before I get my head around my own idea!

I’m positive that this idea is not likely to be unique in the realms of creativity, but it is a new idea for me. Now all I have to do is to follow through with it and see where it leads.

The original drawing is approx 6″ x 6″ (15.5cm x 15.5cm) in size. I used Tombow Fudenosuke, Sakura Pigma Sensei 04, Unball Unipin 0.1 and Pentel Sign pens to draw the design on Daler Rowney Simply… Sketch extra white paper. The paper isn’t as smooth as I usually like and it tends to ‘grab’ pencil lines, even in soft 2B, but it did the job.

Digitally all I did was to clean up the image and create a transparent background and then add a coloured, textured watercolour paper as a background to the drawing before adding my watermarks.

I do want to do some shading on this drawing, but I also have hankering to draw a mandala. Which will win out with me?

I definitely need another big cuppa!

Abstract Floral Design – Coloured

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Abstract Floral Design ©Angela Porter 2019 - Artwyrd.com
Abstract Floral Design ©Angela Porter 2019 – Artwyrd.com

This morning, I thought I’d start my day by colouring in yesterday’s shaded, abstract floral design. And this is the result.

I didn’t remove the shading, but added simple gradient colours above it so that the shading would add to the depth and dimension.

Although this image, thanks to whatever WordPress does to the colour of images when uploaded, doesn’t show this, it actually works really well.

Yes, I know. It’s taken me a couple or three years to get around to working out I can underlay shadows and used colour over the top to add depth and dimension. However, I’ve said it before, I learn tricks at my own pace and when they are relevant to me or when I’m ready to try them out.

I may try this design again, but with more vintage-y colours. Maybe. It’s all learning for me that’s for sure!

The design was drawn with Tombow Fudenosuke and Sakura Pigma Sensei pens. Shading and colour was added digitally using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Microsoft Surface Pen and Microsoft Studio.

Abstract Floral Design

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Abstract Floral Design 4 May 2019 ©Angela Porter - Artwyrd.com
Abstract Floral Design 4 May 2019 ©Angela Porter – Artwyrd.com

I started drawing this one fairly late last night and completed it just now. The tools I used were a soft Fudenosuke pen by Tombow, a 0.4 Sakura Pigma Sensei pen on white mixed media paper from Claire Fontaine.

I then scanned the drawing into the Surface Studio and used Autodesk Pro and a Surface Pen to clean up the image and then add a few details and some shading to it.

The original drawing is approx. 5″ x 6″ in size.

I’m quite pleased with this one as it’s not my usual ‘lets see how much space we can fill with line and pattern’ kind of drawing. The design has a kind of leaf shape to it in outline, and I’ve let white space exist in the design, which is really unusual for me.

Working in monotone is also unusual for me, but the grey shading certainly adds depth and dimension to the design, brings it to life.

I also have some brushes in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro that I can use to mimic graphite pencil shading, which I did here.

I started with the flower motif in the middle and let the design flow out from that point. Of course my design motifs had to include foliage, seedpods and some abstract/geometrical patterns too. Oh and some fungi/mushrooms too. And orbs/spheres.

I really like my circular arches of a pattern inspired by Early Celtic/La Tene art. The shading really helped to define this pattern.

I’m going to make this one available for purchase from my RedBubble shop.

Still emotionally exhausted…

I slept so much yesterday and last night. I’m still emotionally exhausted after my trip out on Thursday. I’m still finding it hard to believe how much something so simple exhausted me so much in terms of emotion particularly. I didn’t think I was any more anxious than usual, or stressed than usual. Seems I was oblivious to my own body.

I do feel a bit better today, but I could just curl up and sleep again now and I’ve only been awake for 4 hours.

I won’t go to sleep this afternoon though. I’m going to keep myself awake somehow. Maybe with art. Maybe with some books I bought on Thursday. Maybe with crochet. Maybe with all of them, but not at the same time!

Even though I’m exhausted I do feel quite content within myself. However, even though it’s a lovely sunny day, if rather windy, here in Welsh Wales, I don’t think I’ll venture out into the realms of peopledom. It’s another Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK so the world tends to be more people-y than usual. I think that could overwhelm me again and I’m better off just remaining where I feel safe and calm.

The more aware I am of my emotions and my self, the more aware I am of how much CPTSD has affected me, of how it limits my life, and of how much work I still have to do. Mind you, that self awareness is showing me as well the progress I have made and how I make decisions based around self care too. Like today, knowing the world is too people-y and somethings can be left until the world is a little less people-y.