MY ART

My Recent Sewing/Textile Projects: Art, A Bag, & A Quilt

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Lately I’ve been really into sewing and making things with textiles, fibers, yarns, beads, and crafty supplies. I made this small fabric panel featuring a ton of scenes and ideas mashed together in one collage-like scrappy, crooked square.

untitled (i don’t know), fabric collage (embroidery thread, various fabrics, sequins, and a little clay star), ~17.5″ x 17.5″, 2021

Some close-up detail shots:

Patchwork Bag – I also made a patchwork flower bag inspired by a bag I saw on Pinterest. Here are some of my process pictures and my final product:

My Quilt – I worked on my quilt in February and March. It was my first quilt and it was a very fun process:

As I was finishing up my quilt, my mom showed me a quilt made by my great-grandmother where she had stitched in her name and the date, so I decided to do the same.

Eric Carle Inspired Earrings

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I made Eric Carle Hungry Caterpillar inspired earrings! This was a tedious process, but I am super happy with how they turned out 🙂

How I made my earrings:

  1. First, I grabbed a ton of construction paper scraps and added random marks with crayons. Then I painted on top of the paper with watercolors/ink to add more color variations.
  2. Once I had all my papers prepped (I used green, red, yellow, purple, and brown), I began cutting out the different shapes to create a collaged caterpillar. Basically, lots of tiny ovals.
  3. Then, I mod podged all the collage pieces onto my base paper. To make the base paper, I mod podged three pieces of cardstock together to make a sturdy base. Once I attached all my collaged pieces of the caterpillar to the base, I went over the whole thing with a couple layers of mod podge to hold everything in place and protect the paper.
  4. For the butterfly earring, I followed the same steps, yet I went in with different shapes and colors. In the second to last picture below, you can see how I sketched out my butterfly shape and used that as a base for the collage.
  5. Next, I added in the details. I added a small piece of wire for the butterfly antennae, and then I made a flower and an apple with a hole in it for the top part of the earrings.
  6. The final part was poking holes into each paper piece to attach jump rings and earrings to all the pieces.

And ta da!!! Here are my final Eric Carle inspired earrings:

I LOVE how they turned out 🙂

My Daily Self-Portraits

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Because I already had an alarm set for 8pm each day, I decided I might as well draw every night when my alarm went off. And I was pretty consistent for a month and a half, and then I stopped. I made myself draw even when I didn’t want to draw. Some drawings are more gestural, some are just a few marks, and some I spent more time on. Some drawings really suck – the eyes are too close or too far from each other, the proportions are off, the nose looks flat and squished. Some drawings I spent 5 seconds on, some I spent an hour on. Some I drew in the dark. When I skipped a few days, I made it up by drawing more than one self-portrait over the next few days. At the end, I was skipping more and more days and I was spending less time on my drawings, so I thought it would be a good place to stop. I’m going to draw myself every day again soon. I want to fill that sketchbook with bad self-portrait drawings. My favorite drawing is the one from 10/22/2020 because I stopped caring about details and focused on shadow and gesture. Here are my daily self-portrait drawings from 10/15/2020 – 12/5/2020:

Art Rut

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I miss making art. Not making art makes me feel lost. I have lost my art soul and I don’t know how to find it again. Art used to make me feel something, I used to channel my feelings into my art. I used to spend every second of free time painting and sketching.

Now, I try to draw or paint, but it doesn’t feel right. I miss being an artist but I don’t know how to be an artist again. I want to make art that I care about again. I miss making art with people in an art studio, I miss being surrounded by art people, I miss myself. I miss feeling the art, I miss the creative flow state and I don’t know how to get it back.

I’m trying – I try to draw almost every day, but it doesn’t feel right. I made myself draw a self-portrait every night at 8pm for 2 months. I laid out all my art supplies on my desk so I can easily begin creating when the feeling arises. Yet I’m still stuck in the rut. I need to find my art to find myself and feel right. I don’t feel right without my art.

Normally when I’m uninspired, I go to museums or figure drawing sessions at my local art center (neither of which I am able to do right now), or I go on walks and photograph things that interest me. And I write. I have notebooks full of writing, I have photographs of trees and buildings, but I am still uninspired. Maybe I need to put less pressure on myself to make “good” art. Maybe I need to let go and stop trying to force myself to find my art right now. I suppose getting out of an art rut is a process. It really sucks being so artistically uninspired, but maybe it’s okay to let go of the idea of needing to make something “good” and focus simply on creating something.

And at least I am drawing, even though the drawings are sloppy and rushed, maybe that’s okay. I will make what I can and see what happens. I suppose most people go through ruts of some sort, whether it’s writer’s block or artist’s block or another obstacle. Maybe I need to stop fighting with the rut and just embrace my lack of ideas and just make bad, ugly art since that is all I can make right now.

I think I need to accept my art rut and commit to it, stay in it, see what happens, let go of any idea of who I am as an artist and simply make whatever I want to make.

My sketchbook:

confusion soup process

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Confusion Soup helped me break free of painting the same old way I always had – realistic, detailed, and slowly. For this painting, I broke all of my internalized art rules. I splattered paint, let paint drip, used large globs of paint, let the colors mix on the canvas, and turned the painting upside down and all around as I worked. I had no plan. I started with a turquoise green and then I flipped through my phone camera roll until I found an image that I liked. Then I painted it on, without caring about composition or if it looked good. It was very freeing to throw paint around and not worry about making a “perfect” painting. I also discovered that I really enjoy working like this – going into the painting with no preconceived notions as to the end product.

As for the title, during the critique, my professor said she was very confused by the painting (but in a good way, I think), and later she said the painting reminded her of soup. Hence, the title “Confusion Soup” was created.

Ever since painting this back in November of 2018, I have become a lot more brave with my art. I used to worry about wasting paint and messing up the canvas, but now I feel more free to explore, experiment, and create.

fragments

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Fragments 1/2
Fragments 1/2, acrylic on paper, 2019

Fragments 2/2
Fragments 2/2, acrylic on paper, 2019

two small acrylic paintings on paper

painted on may 10, 2019

fragments

I forgot I had painted these until today. I was cleaning my room when I found them – it was quite unexpected. I remember painting these during finals week, taking a break and creating a painting just for myself. The semester had been full of strict assignments, limited to charcoal and sculpture, but mainly lowenfeld and dewey. Fragments far away. Fragments of myself. Fragments of places, memories, emotions.

Inktober 2018 – Day 8, 9, & 10

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This week has been super busy because I have been trying to finish all my studio work before fall break.  I painted the majority of the day yesterday, and today I spent the whole day in the printmaking studio working on my intaglio etching project. I finally had time to write a blog post today since I did not have class. Here is a recap of the Inktober days that I missed:

On Inktober Day 8, I spent the whole day working on my design and then scratching my design into the copper plate. I drew the main component of my design on a piece of paper and then did a graphite transfer drawing onto my copper plate.

sketch for my copper plate

On Inktober Day 9, I did nothing. Well, I did do things I just didn’t have time to do Inktober; I had class all day and no time to draw. I still wanted to do a drawing for the prompt (precious), so I did a drawing today to make up for missing yesterday. I drew this from a photo that I took when I was a relatively young kid.

childhood is precious

On Inktober Day 10, today, I worked on making prints using the printing press. Honestly, I am not very happy with how my prints turned out because I don’t like my design, but I don’t have time to change it so I have to stick with it. I had a difficult time with coming up with a design for this project because I had so many ideas that I couldn’t commit to just one. The objective for this assignment is to create prints (using etching intaglio process) related to the theme of memory.

one of my prints (oops, the photograph quality is awful)

Inktober 2018 – Day 5

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I spent most of my day in class, and then I went to the painting studio at 6:00 and I ended up staying until 10:30. Now I’m back in my dorm, and really tired (yet again) so for Inktober I have another pen doodle I did during class (the left picture) . It is just a sketch of an idea I have, so it’s not very detailed.

I drew the image on the right a few months ago so it doesn’t really count for Inktober, but the prompt for Inktober today is the word chicken so I decided to include the drawing anyways.

inktober-day-5
a nice, crisp image trace of my chicken drawing