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.

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 Intermission

It’s Thanksgiving here, which means lots of activity with family and friends this long weekend.

I’ll get back to posting my InkTober drawings on my Instagram page—and here—when all the eating is over… 🦃🥘🥧😊

In the meantime, I thought I’d share some photos of the beautiful autumn colours surrounding us as the seasons change and the leaves fall from the trees: