Category Archives for Drawing

My Colour-Filled Art Therapy

I LOVE colour!  😍🌈

I also love being able to see, at a glance, how much colour I use throughout the year in the pages I create to cope with my chronic pain and chronic illness.

Using an app to analyze the posts on my Instagram page, I can see which colours I use most. The larger circles in the diagram represent the most used colours. With this information I can either continue to use those favourites or make a conscious effort to include some of the lesser used colours in what I create this coming year.

I’m sharing the colour graph on a white and a black background so it’s possible to see how a light or dark background can make different colours pop.

 

______ Year of Colour 2019 – White ______

 

______ Year of Colour 2019 – Black ______

 

These diagrams made me recall a time when I was younger when I painted the main living areas of the apartment I lived in bright white to give myself the option(s) of using brightly coloured furniture and accessories to decorate; and the ability to update the colours as often as I wanted without them clashing with the walls.

So many colours, so little time…

 

Note: If you click on either of the above images, they will take you to my Instagram page where you can see the list of tags that identify some of the art supplies I used to add colour to the pages I created over the course of last year.

 

 

Looking Back: My Best Nine of 2019

Last year I found it easier to create posts for my Instagram page, than to write posts for my blog. For me, creating a post for Instagram involves choosing a photograph then writing a short caption about it. Whereas writing a blog post feels as though it requires more thoughtfulness and purpose. These self-imposed rules and restrictions resulted in me creating 92 posts for Instagram, while only writing 28 posts here, for my blog.

I find this curious because what I post in one space is no less (or more) relevant to what I live with each day. Except that what I post on Instagram tends to be more geared towards the creative practice I engage with to cope with my health issues, and what I post here tends to concern the heavier health-related issues and treatments.

I’m not sure why that division developed. However, I will be doing some things to consciously change that this year.

Nonetheless, I decided to use an app to do the work of choosing which of my Instagram posts received the most activity in 2019. The app did the hard work of choosing my best nine posts based purely on hard numbers about how many likes a post receives after I’ve poured my creativity out on a page; and then gone through the lengthy internal debate with myself about whether I want other people to decide if what I’ve created is any good.

I didn’t agree completely with the apps choices. So after reviewing what it chose, I took a look through my page and swapped some of the app’s choices for others that made me happier.

The first grid is a compilation of the app’s choices and the posts I replaced; and I prefer it because it has some emotional input in the choices in contrast to the second that was created with hard numbers.

The second grid contains the choices the app alone made.

Let me know which grid you prefer.

 

InkTober 2019: Drawings for Day 21 to Day 31 Prompts

InkTober is officially finished—for me.

I drew my final illustration for the last prompt and posted it to my Instagram page yesterday. It should have taken a few more days to get it all done, but I was able to catch up as quickly as I did after taking my long weekend hiatus because there were a few days where I drew multiple illustrations.

Now, I have 31 illustrations in my art journal/sketchbook that stretched and thankfully improved my drawing skills over the span of a month. It was a challenge to make it through the month and I’m proud of myself for not throwing in the towel, even when I was stressed about being behind by 4 days because of the break I took from posting. There was also the challenge of keeping creatively motivated enough to think of things to draw that accurately illustrated the daily prompts.

Overall, I’m pleased with what I created and happy that I decided to participate in InkTober this year.

In this post, I’m sharing illustrations from Day 21 to Day 31 of the challenge.

 

On Day 21, I drew things to illustrate the prompt Treasure. That prompt made me think about what I treasure most in life, which are the people to whom I’m connected and the experiences I’ve shared with them.

_____ InkTober 2019 – Day 21 Treasure _____

 

As old as I am ghost stories still scare me. There’s something about not knowing exactly what happens to us—to our energy—after we die that makes it possible for me to believe that we could linger, stuck, between existences or space and time as we attempt to resolve whatever issue(s) may be keeping us here haunting the people and places we’ve loved and now must leave behind.

Does anyone else believe this could be true?

I invested a lot of time in my drawings for InkTober and it put me far behind. Because I was still behind for the Day 22 prompt, Ghost, I timed myself and finished this illustration in 15 minutes.

_____ InkTober 2019 – Day 22 Ghost _____

 

I haven’t traveled enough. I don’t know if anyone ever feels as if they have.

There are so many places I’d like to see—not simply for the sake of checking them off a bucket list—but because I’ve always been interested in history and learning about different cultures and there’s no better way to do that than traveling.

One of the places I’d like to visit that perfectly illustrates the prompt Ancient for Day 23 of InkTober is the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. Every person I know who has seen the pyramids has returned home in awe that they were built and survived thousands of years.

Who wouldn’t want to share in that experience?

_____ InkTober 2019 – Day 23 Ancient _____

 

Vertigo isn’t just the name of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

It’s a medical condition that, in my experience, can be as mild as feeling slightly off-balance when you stand up to not being able to stand or walk at all because lifting your head alone can make you feel like the entire world is actually spinning around you. The dizziness it causes can also make you feel extreme nausea.

At one point I experienced vertigo as the rare side effect of a prescribed medication. At other times, the cause couldn’t be identified and each episode varied in duration and intensity. Fortunately, for me, the dizzying symptoms of vertigo usually go away on their own. However, there can be severe cases when medication, physiotherapy, and/or surgery may be necessary to treat it.

I hope this simple drawing illustrated the Day 24 prompt, Dizzy, for InkTober well.

_____ InkTober 2019 – Day 24 Dizzy _____

 

When I was a kid my absolute favourite ice cream flavour was Orange Sherbet.

It was the only flavour I asked for whenever we went to Baskin Robbins and it felt like it was the only flavour that could satisfy my craving for ice cream. If it wasn’t available it was nearly impossible for me to choose another flavour. Since then I’ve expanded my palette considerably when it comes to eating tasty, sweet, creamy, cold treats.

These days a visit to Baskin Robbins usually finds me seeking out Strawberry Cheesecake ice cream. It’s the perfect blend of two delicious treats.

What was your childhood favourite ice cream flavour?

I hope everyone agrees ice cream is Tasty and a good choice to illustrate the Day 25 InkTober prompt.

By the way, this is not an ad. Baskin Robbins just happens to be the place where I can find the ice cream flavours I like.

_____ InkTober 2019 – Day 25 Tasty _____

 

CONFESSION: I’m a chocoholic.

The end.

I hope my drawing of dark chocolate got your taste buds working. I drew the expensive kind with a foil wrapper for the InkTober Day 26 prompt Dark.

_____ InkTober 2019 – Day 26 Dark _____

 

Coat is the prompt for Day 27. I love a well-designed coat: the shape, colour, fabric, even an interesting pattern. Most of all, I love the warmth a good coat provides during our long winters.

Every year when spring arrives, I tend to wear my coat/jacket well beyond the time that the weather starts to warm up. I think it might be because I don’t want to give up the layer of cozy warmth that carried me through the colder months.

I wonder if anyone else holds on to their coat longer than necessary in the spring…

_____ InkTober 2019 – Day 27 Coat _____

 

I can still remember my first bicycle. It was bright yellow with white tires (training wheels too) and a white seat. It took a while for me to learn to ride it without the training wheels and once I learned it was hard to get me off it.

The bicycle I own now isn’t as brightly coloured. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to ride it since becoming ill and I don’t know when or if I’ll ride one again. That’s a thought that saddens me because there is a certain freedom in getting on a bicycle and moving your body through city streets or along park trails for hours or as far as your legs can pedal you.

It’s a freedom that I miss and truly hope I can reclaim.

Ride is the prompt for Day 28 of InkTober.

_____ InkTober 2019 – Day 28 Ride _____

 

It took much longer than I had intended to illustrate this prompt.

I was determined to make it resemble a real hand no matter how much time I had to invest.

My one hope is that it was obvious that it’s an injured hand before I identified it for you.

Injured is the prompt for Day 29.

_____ InkTober 2019 – Day 29 Injured _____

 

I might have caught the prettiest fish that never existed.

I have a fuzzy memory from childhood of going fishing in the Caribbean Sea with one of my uncles. I’m quite certain I didn’t catch anything. In fact, I might not have touched the fishing pole. But it’s one of the few memories I have where that uncle played a significant role and whenever I recall it I feel happy and warm.

I drew this pretty fish to illustrate the prompt Catch for Day 30 of InkTober.

_____ InkTober 2019 – Day 30 Catch _____

 

I crossed the InkTober finish line a couple days late but the important thing to me is that I finished by drawing something for each of the 31 prompts.

The last prompt in the challenge is Ripe and it reminded me of a day years ago when I went to pick peaches and cherries with friends at an orchard.

We picked ripe fruit straight from the branches of trees and we ate some right from the branches too. Then we each left the orchard carrying overflowing baskets of delicious fruit.

From where I sit that’s not a bad memory to end this month-long challenge thinking about.

_____ InkTober 2019 – Day 31 Ripe _____

 

If you participated in InkTober this year, I hope you feel a similar, or greater, level of satisfaction with what you created and that you continue drawing.