Week 2 - Identity

I'm calling this doodle Painter and it was done in Painter IX

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Following in Tinker's footsteps here are 10 Random Things

1. This week is called Identity. I wonder who I'll decide I am.
2. Its the North Bristol Art Trail this weekend. One of the open evenings is in our road.
3. On Sunday, Jim and I were out because it was such a gorgeous day and I noticed at the top of the park something glinting in the sun. Although we'd not planned to go that way we went to find out what it was gleaming. This is what we found:
   
   
   A whole load of children's pictures laminated and tied to the railings plus an advert for the North Bristol Art Trail. This year I was bound to find out about it!
4. There was another angel reference on the radio today (Wednesday's Afternoon Play called Forever Mine). This time it was a play about life after death and the angel featured strongly.
5. We are having a new boiler fitted soon, I booked it today. We are expecting it in the week commencing December 11th - which is in the middle of the section I've called Fire (and in either the week called Integrity or Possibility). But at least ought to be operational before Christmas!
6. Jim is going to a talk on avalanches tonight. He's never been in one but thought it would be worth knowing about them "just in case".
   
7. I'm having trouble being random.... which is odd because I can be quite random when asked not to be. I've wondered for sometime if I have a built in contrariness filter. And its hard to work around it on purpose (for instance by asking myself to list 10 things that are on my mind right now) as I know thats what I'm doing.
8. I had a dream where I was a cleaner in a large business building. I'd been sacked and was preparing to wreck havoc!
   
9. I've got to rush its almost 6pm and I've scheduled some drawing for an hour starting then.
10. When I was little I had a toy that was made out of plastic clowns whose feet slotted into each other shoulders. I had difficulty saying shoulders and called these my soldiers.
    

Synchronicities - review of Safety

A very mixed media collage reviewing my first week of revisiting the artist way.

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Earlier in the year I really enjoyed the Mixed Media Memoirs inspired by Melba. The way that I did them I found them to be a very powerful method for dredging* through my not-conscious self and putting together the images I'd already been working with, whether on the computer or in my journals or dreams.

As I've not been joining in with the current run through the chakras that Melba has been engaged in I've not been doing any recently. However I thought I'd experiment with this style as a way of doing my reviews of each week this time through the artist way. After all if I'm doing Morning Doodles instead of Morning Pages it seems only logical to have a more image-oriented way of reflecting on the week that has past.

Some of these images I blogged on the day I did them but others have gone unmentioned until now (still more didn't make it into this collage but that's okay reviews are selective).

Clockwise from the top

Shepherd - in this last week I've been drawn to three different images of shepherds; one a Cotswold shepherd (drawn here), one a bishop and the other a woman who is both a shepherd and a priest. (And I've wondered why they carry crooks because, with all my recent reading of detective stories, crooks are the bad guys! ;-)

Boat - see Lifes Ups and Downs

A rather sad looking woman - she was a doodle that came through one morning and does express the not so cheerful, not so brave, not so carefree part of me

The witch - I got as far as putting her up on flickr but when the posting I'd written to go with her was discarded by Firefox crashing I got all superstitious and refused to redo it!

Life / DNA building block - this was a fun doodle that I just didn't happen to blog

Face Your Body - see Day 1: Revisiting the Artist's Way

Madam Butterfly - see yesterday's Butterflies. I've never laughed so much at one of my own pictures as I have done looking at her!

Blue butterfly - this was one the first versions of the butterfly that became Madam Butterfly - though here I've played with it some more so its transformed yet again.

Then there is the big black butterfly which I cut out intending to make the diamond earring be lined up with the body. When I opened it up and looked at it I discovered that I also had some words on it - "art of you" - this had originally been "part of you" in an advert for jewelry - I took this as encouragement to make the next butterfly

Me as Butterfly - and now I know that if you feel little bumps on your head they might not be devils horns growing but the beginning of your butterfly's antennae!

In the background I used the orange scribble from last Friday. Reluctant Nomad had commented on this being a synchronicity for him and has since blogged about it.

I found myself very engrossed with making art this week, however I also found time to read E is for Evidence, F is for Fugitive, G is for Gumshoe and H is for Homicide and sold (through my Amazon marketplace listings):

• The Wheel of Eternity
• Balancing Your Chakras: How to Balance Your Seven Energy Centres for Health and Wellbeing by Sonia Choquette
• Your Heart's Desire: Using the Laws of Manifestation to Create the Life You Want by Sonia Choquette
• A Little Light on the Spiritual Laws
• Witch Crafts: 101 Projects for Creative Pagans

So, having laid what I hope is a good safe foundation for the next few weeks, tomorrow I'll be starting on identity - but wait I've just started that today - I am a butterfly and I have come out of my chrysalis! I really do hope it is safe!

* I dredge my not-conscious, whilst I've noticed Tinker has been wading in her stream of consciousness.

Butterflies

This is a butterfly shape cut out of a magazine and then reflected on itself in Painter IX.

Yesterday Kat had a painting of a tree of butterflies it recalled to me that last month on one day I'd spotted what at first I'd thought was a butterfly and then realised was a leaf, and on the next I'd seen a leaf floating in the wind that turned out to be a butterfly. Seeing Kat's picture made me realise that I needed to work more with the idea of butterflies. I've seen lots of collage artists putting wings onto people, often using butterfly wings, and they produce some very beautiful results; but I've never felt inclined to do any myself before.

Maybe this is why:

Uncertainty Principle

The UFO from Thursday has been identified as Schrödinger's cat. Here it is trying to pull a little green alien into a violent hole. Notice how the violent hole has a hazy edge representing an uncertain event horizon - especially for the poor little alien.

Ian mentioned in the comments to that photo an interview with Nick Pope, a British ex-MOD man, who'd been put in charge of checking out UFO sightings.
Listening to the interview there are some important clues:

• Mr Pope has just left the MOD (last week)
• He only worked on UFOs for 3 years (early 1990s)
• He considered 5% of reports to be "interesting"
• He said "A statistic which is not widely known - of all the requests that the Ministry of Defence gets under the freedom of information act; the number one subject that they get requests on is.... UFOs"

From which I conclude that of all the things he's done in the last 21 years the one that is the biggest potential money spinner is the UFO one, and may also be the only one he'd get clearance to write about. Of course I can't be certain.

By the way I'm not saying that aliens do or do not exist. That UFOs do or do not hover over us, (or Hoover over us). Again I can't be certain.

Animal Window

Donkey wondering how it got a horse's tail - in Painter IX

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This is another exercise from Art Escapes. You can see that a variation of it is on the cover of the book. In essence one draws a simple figure then divides it into four and uses a different paint effect in the background of each square.

I like how grassy the bottom right square looks but that snake was a bit of a surprise!

IF - Thanksgiving

Drawn using my new pencils then scanned, and a smidgen of colour added in Painter IX.

Does this count as mixed media or would pencil have been better?

Scribble

This morning I've done lots and lots of morning doodles and my favourite is this one which is really pure scribble.

And now the post has arrived I've got some new pencils and blenders to play with:

These are two propelling pencils with soft leads - 6B and B. From Studio Arts.

UFO

I just spotted this floating in the sunset - by the time I'd got my camera out it was against darker clouds. I don't have a long enough lens to really get close to things this small / far away. I assume it was a balloon - it was moving quickly in the wind.
Flicker enlarged it to this for the thumbnail view:

And I had a go at enlarging and enhancing it in Painter IX and got this:


Perhaps even more amazing than this odd object is that this is my 3rd posting today!

I think it may have been a ballon in the shape of a cat - what do you think it was?

Wait - Rose!

I've just been shopping. I went to Waitrose. They have a quickcheck system which allows you to scan your own items as you go round. Then pay at an automatic checkout. I've used it since it was first introduced in my local store. I've loved it. (Though when they do a spot check and re-scan everything its always really nerve-wracking - worse than an exam!) Until today it was my favourite supermarket.

Today I used the new version of the system. I put my card in. It then told me the total and asked me to pay. Before it had always reviewed what I'd bought. I found this reassuring - it meant the program had matched up properly and I was about to pay for the things I'd put in my trolley. The new system didn't. I wondered what was wrong. I wasn't even sure it was working. It did produce a receipt AFTER I'd paid. I wasn't happy. I told a member of staff and she said it was quicker. I pointed out that it hadn't given me any indication that it was my bill I was being asked to pay and she looked at me like I was an idiot. She said you are meant to check as you scan. I looked at her like she was an idiot. I told her I was a programmer (didn't mention the retired part) and that I just wasn't going to trust a computer system that far.

So that's it. The end of faster shopping and back to letting them scan it all. Which may also mean Goodbye waitRose...

Life's ups and downs

Going with the flow. Riding the wave.

This morning's doodle looks like a very cheerful boat able to ride even stormy seas.

And having just spotted this exercise at Steve's Go Flying Turtle I've made more faces: