was horrible. It made me feel lost, sad and ungrateful. I felt lost because I have lived and breathed it for so many years and now nothing. Sad because my heart craved it, but my mind and body will not be forced to cooperate. Ungrateful, because I have every medium known to man kind and more paper than I will ever use in my life and it sat there untouched.
I decided to take an active approach, so I could nip this thing and face it head on. I went to the library and checked out some books on creativity. The high points and thoughts from my research were:
Find my muse. Yeah…Find my muse? Muse- ok that just means my inspiration. What usually inspires me to draw and paint? Got it! Mad, sad, happy, glad, bored, busy, tired, hungry and full. Pretty much anytime was usually the right time. Next, what do I draw or paint? I draw animals which is mostly dogs and cats, and I have been dabbling in landscapes, but I don’t paint much of anything. Last, what would I like to draw or paint? I have no idea.
Keep ideas on index cards. I thought that this technique was for writers. But hey, what do I know. They wrote the book, it got published. I deemed it worthy of checking out so I grabbed some of my daughter’s cards and stashed a few around to jot down ideas. I can’t tell you how helpful that was. I used them as grocery lists and scrap paper.
Find my voice. I still haven’t figured that one out… They may be talking about style? But that is just as vague to me as finding my voice.
Change Mediums. Well, that may work. I don’t paint very much and I have all those acrylics, watercolors, and gouache going to waste.
Relax. Are you kidding me? I’m as relaxed as person can be without prescription.
I thought most of these ideas completely ridiculous taken individually until I stumbled across this:
The desire to create knows not good or bad and it ignores technique and critique, it just is. -me
I wrote this quote as part of my personal New Year’s resolution. And boy am I letting myself down. A person should not have to remind themselves to have fun. But tucked away in my hot pink binder, I did in fact do that. And I have ignored it completely. Now the book isn’t quite as stupid as I thought because even though it wasn’t on a note card, it was on a scrap of paper. The muse is finding inspiration in the boring and mundane. Relaxing is to play like a child. A child never erases because they never mess up. Everything is a work of art and they delight in the experience. They don’t care about complementary or tertiary colors. And they don’t care about a value scale. They don’t worry about blogging, etsying, or bitsying unless we are talking spiders. And my life is a change of mediums..Mom, Wife, Woman and Person.
And come to find out I have been creating. I have been sewing, cooking, decorating, creating memories, even created a couple of decorative abstracts, drew a dog, quite a few zentangles and now creating worry. lol… A pencil and a brush is not all life has offer, yet some how I convinced myself otherwise. I’ve been so narrow-minded and now I feel very foolish.
I am sharing this embarrassing moment with the hope that you will not fall into the same trap that I did. And if you are going through something similiar…Remember, life itself is art and creativity, the rest is just icing on the cake and will come when it comes.
After all, we are all works in progress.
Be Well and Happy!
Yep another Zentangle, which means no real artwork from me. I am working on another portrait, but I haven’t finished it yet. It’s a little out of my comfort zone. So it possibly end up as something pretty cool or it could tank. That’s why I don’t post a lot of W.I.P. because it could very well end up being W.I.T. (work in trash)
This is a little sneak peek of a drawing that I’ve been working on. The piece is mainly composed of brick and wood, so it’s going to take a while to finish. I love drawing the wood, but the brick is a little difficult and is still in the rough stages. 
Carol Ottaway 