La la la (Challenge: April 2012 - 'Language')

The www.creativeeveryday.com  challenge for the month of April is Language. 

I love learning new languages (still determined to learn Spanish this year) so my initial thought was to do a piece about translation. However, another idea then came to me - the confusion that can arise in text messaging, as you never really know exactly how a message is meant. So, I am now working on a piece about what can be between the lines in text messages. I think it will be a sewn piece, but I'm still working on the design at the moment!

"The world is a book..." - March challenge

A bit late on the update, but this is the finished product from the March challenge "Mixed Media".

It started with painting blue waves on a canvas, then I stuck various selections from a world map - countries I have visited and ones I wish to travel to in the near future.

The map is a out of proportion as there are large areas missing and I wanted to include a quote. I found the following by St Augustine: "The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page".

Once the paint had dried I sewed the routes I have travelled in red. I intended to sew planned routes in green, but the wooden frame of the canvas made it quite difficult to do so I left it with just the red.

Now I'm getting on with April's challenge: "Language" - watch this space!

Mixing It Up! (Challenge: March 2012 - 'Mixed Media')

I finally completed my piece inspired by the February theme 'Night'. After some appalling scribbling, I settled on using watercolours to create a sky scene with the sun just visible over a horizon. Then I added the figure of someone looking towards the horizon. The piece is titled 'Perception: Sunrise, Sunset' as I am unsure which part of the day it resembles - or whether it resembles the beginning of something or the end of it... I'll let you come to your own conclusions.

The end result is not quite how I saw it in my mind, but I think I need a bit more practice with a paintbrush before my hand-mind co-ordination improves!

The new theme in the www.creativeeveryday.com challenge is 'mixed media'.

My gut instinct is to create a 3D map of my travels in 2010-2011... Watch this space!

Night Owl (Challenge: February 2012 - 'Night')

I am a night owl - no shadow of a doubt!

Continuing my challenge with http://creativeeveryday.com  this month the stimulus is 'night' which I find rather exciting as I appear to be mostly nocturnal.


Rather than allocate time to create, however, I have decided to aim to create a full piece by the end of the month. I want to finish a sketch/painting about the night - and I must admit that I am no painter - (sadly my hands do not appear capable of replicating what I see in my mind). But I shall take on this challenge and see what I come up with...

Challenge: January 2012 - 'New'

I recently signed up to the "Creative Every Day Challenge" on the following website:

http://creativeeveryday.com 

The theme for January is "New".
I was a little late starting this challenge, but every month from now on I intend to follow the stimulus and blog about it.

'New':
At first I thought 'I could learn a new skill - maybe to crochet, or sign up for a photography course....' etc. In essence, I was thinking of adding to the skills I already have (or think I have!).

But then somebody showed me the following article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html?_r=4&pagewanted=all

It really struck a chord with me.

In 2010 I left the UK to go travelling for a while - I ended up being away for eight months in total. Only a handful of people in the UK had my international/Aussie phone number and I deliberately did not go online every single day - once a week was probably my average. I loved being away from it all - I could not understand how so many people had a laptop in their rucksack and had the need to Skype home every day. What was the point in being on the other side of the world?!
I chose that time to focus on other things - I read an average of 1.3 books a week in those eight months and listened to more music than I can remember! I also kept journals/scrapbooks detailing the sights I had seen, the people I had met and the highs and lows of being on my own, exploring other countries and cultures.

I often miss the simplicity that my travelling alter-ego enjoyed.

The challenge I have chosen for January is in fact not all that new, but more of a step towards how it used to be... simpler.

Every day for at least one hour I will switch off from everything - no phone, no TV, no iTunes, no e-mail, no facebook, no internet... Just me, the quiet, my thoughts and maybe a pen and paper. And who knows, maybe (or should I say, hopefully,) something creative will emerge... Maybe I'll finally finish the synopsis for a novel that has been whirring in my mind over the last year or so, or even design the costumes for the show I want to produce...

One hour.
Every day.

Let the challenge begin...