you get on a roll and things just kind of take on a life of their very own, and before you know it, entire WEEKS have gone by and you have a stack of whatever it is you do?
(p.s. We’ll show off a few of those pages you see there, explain what it is, and also show you about a zillion of those Sonheim-inspired ATCs, too. Just a few more pages first….)
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It’s been a while since we had an 82 Card Challenge update. These are some we’re working on right now.
They look like blobs, don’t they?
Back in August or so, the Artist took the amazing Carla Sonheim’s equally-amazing Imaginary Creatures online class. (Which is fabulous, by the way, and if you get a chance to take it any time soon, it’s highly, highly recommended.) One of the techniques she taught was essentially a Rorschach test — make a blob of watercolor with a big brush, let it dry, and then find the animal in the blob of color. (Which is much harder than it sounds, trust us.)
All fourteen of these cards (each with multiple watercolor washes, by the way) are all blobbed up and ready to go. This one closest to the camera just became a sitting badger/beaver thing, for instance.
With this batch (when it’s done), the grand total of the 82CC will be 36. Almost half-way there! (Granted, that’s over almost a year, but…) The stack of blank Medaevialis cards is getting shorter and shorter.
If you’re not familiar with the 82 Card Challenge, the explanation is linked to this little button right here:
How are you folks doing? Making tons of cards and leaving the Artist in the (vividly technicolor) dust? Update!
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Every Monday, the Artist has been asking people over on Facebook if there’s anything she can help them with. She says it’s to give her a break from thinking about Monday, but the monsters are pretty convinced it’s just a procrastination technique to keep her from baking them cookies.
Either way, today, our friend Sandie H. mentioned that she’s in a cool group of people that all get together and eat food from various countries, and that she was looking for a passport that she could give to her guests.
Voila, Sandie! A printable passport for you.
The instructions are on page 4 of the pdf, and since it’s not specific to any one group, we decided to share it here, too. Just print off however many pages you need, print the cover on the back of some patterned cardstock, and put the whole thing together.
Enjoy your culinary trip around the world!
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We’re taking a break today from relentless art journal silliness and monster antics to talk about something awesome: creative inspiration. (And possibly mail art and art journal silliness, because we can’t help ourselves.)
It’s hard to explain why a certain idea can catch fire and take hold, while other, seemingly easier, ideas get put on a backburner. We’re pretty sure Google has an alogrithm for that somewhere, but they keep it in a locked vault and only let five-year-olds look at it. (Have you seen a five year old’s decision-making process? ”COOL!” and “THAT’S STUPID.” are the only criteria. Also, probably, based on that same algorithm.)
So while doing a little looking around at some nifty stuff she’s considering for a new issue of BeMUSEd (which we’ll talk about shortly, here), the Artist happened upon a mention of something kind of awesome from history: The Republic of Letters.
To quote a Stanford University site that’s aiming to map out the social influence of the group, The Republic of Letters was:
A pre-disciplinary community in which most of the modern disciplines developed, it was the ancestor to a wide range of intellectual societies from the seventeenth-century salons and eighteenth-century coffeehouses to the scientific academy or learned society and the modern research university. Forged in the humanist culture of learning that promoted the ancient ideal of the republic as the place for free and continuous exchange of knowledge, the Republic of Letters was simultaneously an imagined community (a scholar’s utopia where differences, in theory, would not matter), an information network, and a dynamic platform from which a wide variety of intellectual projects – many of them with important ramifications for society, politics, and religion – were proposed, vetted, and executed.
(It was kind of like the 1600′s answer to the Internet, wasn’t it? Rock on.)
The Artist was intrigued. Granted, this is partially because her rich inner fantasy life consists of wild, brocade-upholstered salons and a bunch of really smart people drinking absinthe and talking about the meaning of life. But it’s also partially because the name of the thing, The Republic of Letters, is just awesome, with a side of awesomesauce. Think about it: wouldn’t it be beyond cool to have a place where smart, creative, visionary people could send mail art to each other — decorated letters and collaged postcards and crazy packages full of glittery things — in “a scholar’s utopia where differences, in theory, would not matter”? We could tackle big issues or philosophy, or concepts and society. Create stuff. Talk about it somewhere. Send each other smart little packages tied up in string.
The monsters here in the cottage on the prairie have been scrambling around for the past couple weeks, thinking very hard and gathering some resources for something kind of big. After almost seven years after the last issue of BEMUSED went out on postal wings, we’ve been examining the idea of using all this fancypants technology stuff to start it up again. Some folks are a wee bit excited by this, and so is the crew here. (For those that don’t know, BEMUSED was a monthly newsletter back in the early ’00s. It was 4-6 pages long every month, with one double issue in the summer, with a little teaspoon-sized dollop of artistic inspiration for you to play with — articles and techniques, books and worksheets and things to cut out, that kind of thing. TONS of fun to do.)
So what we’re thinking is this:
If we end up getting enough interest in BEMUSED’s restart, we’re going to make the new Republic of Letters a part of that, and post all our salon-ish exchanges of postal knowledge on the subscribers’ site for BEMUSED readers.
How cool is that?!
If you haven’t signed up to be notified about the relaunch when we get ready to go, sign up right here. (One of these days, the Artist promises to make a prettier form and a nice little thank you letter, but she’s busy polishing off her dusty tomes of Voltaire and Ben Franklin’s Autobiography and practicing making teacakes and sighing deeply. It’s a boring form, but it works, and we’ll keep you in the loop when we’re ready to begin.)
Dust off your letter writin’ skillz, people! It’s time for a glittering utopia of ideas.
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We know life’s a process, right? That right now, you may be at Point A and after a few twists and turns and tunnels, you’ll arrive at Point B, and if you’re one of the lucky creative peeps who keeps a journal, you’ll have all of that documented, like a map in retrospect that charts your own history.
What if, instead of documenting your life as it happens, after events and the everyday have already occurred…you were to use your journal as a tool? A map, so to speak, not of where you were, but where you want to be?
Right now, probably about half of you are intrigued. The other half thinks that it’s crazytalk and that clearly, the monsters have been dipping a little too heavily into the rum-soaked fruitcakes that they’re baking for the holidays. (Minus the fruitcake. Hello, rum!)
But think about it for a second: Where else are you completely safe to let your mind wander, let your heart dream, and, moreover, to change your mind five hundred times and not have people roll their eyes at you? Where else can you squee forth all the crazy imaginings, in vivid technicolor, in a way that uniquely inspires you (and possibly makes one heckuva tool for moving ahead)?
Every year, the Artist does what she calls a Life Vision Exercise on her birthday. (It’s been explained elsewhere, but if you’re interested in specifics, she’d be happy to put up a page about it at some point. Just let us know.) It’s essentially a year-forward vision board in text and pictures, of all the things that already happened, and all the things she’s hoping to make happen for the next year (or six. She overestimates how much time she has sometimes.).
This same kind of process would work for any goal or dream you might have. Just write it down (or draw it, or collage it, or sing it and tape in a recording — whatever works for you), and picture the end result. What would it be like if that dream had already come true? How would you feel? What would be changed? Picture it all, and either write it or illustrate it.
Then it’s just a matter of mapping out the steps that will take you from Right Now, as things are, to There. What things would have to happen for you to be in that picture at the end of a specified time? What kinds of steps that you have control over would you have to take?
Write them all down. Even the really small steps that you assume are a given. List them out. Number them if you want. Illustrate them, if you’re so inclined. But get them all down. You get extra bonus points if you also estimate how much time you think each one of those would take, since it’s kind of a geeky thrill to find out what kinds of activities just seem like they’ll take forever, but really don’t, and vice versa. (The Artist is one of those geeks. Productivity nerd, that one. The monsters poke her with glitter-encrusted sticks when she gets a new To Do List program.)
Your art journal fun doesn’t have to end with the planning, either. Keep a record of your steps. Every action you take, put it on a page with “TA-DA!!!” written at the top (or something similar), so that you can look back on those unmotivated days when you think you’re not doing enough and realize that you’ve done a whole heck of a lot. If you’re geeky, paste in your time logs or to-do sub-lists when you get things checked off. Keep regular pictures of what you’re building for yourself, and collage around them. Paint before-and-after pictures of your dream every so often, like the before-and-after photos from those weight loss gadget commercials that show your progress.
Your journal can be a friend, a platform, and a really powerful tool while you move forward. When people don’t get what you’re trying to do…journal it. When you hit some milestone on the road…journal it. When you have a down day and can’t imagine getting back on the horse…journal it, and then flip through the rest of it to get your mojo back.
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