Tales From The Sketchbook

I think it is time again for a couple more of my heads. In the last few months I made quite a few, ranging from weird and scary to pretty and beneficial. I have also started to expand my drawing and painting techniques into the mixed media area by participating in online self study courses by an artist called Tamara Laporte, her webpage is called willowing.org and she uses (optional) meditations to highlight the good things and influences in your life and let go of the not so beneficial thinking habits and negative influences. 

I would like to start off with a positive girl I made. 

She is about finding “the light within”, the place inside not tainted by social media induced bullshit, the part of you that is not trying to tell you what a horrible and insufficient person you are but the little part that is good and clean. The thought of this place always reminds me of the Tarot card The Star and of having hope. So I would say she is a very positive girl indeed.

Hope Girl is closely related to Transformation Girl. 

Transformation Girl demonstrates what it feels like for me sometimes to try and turn the shit we see in the newspapers, online, the rubbish commercials and globalisation into something understandable and maybe even beneficial for my children. How do we explain to children the wars that are going on, the injustices in society, ethics and morality? Sometimes my kids (probably like all others as well) ask me questions I have no idea how to answer, one was why countries go to war against each other and if a soldier is a good thing, and what soldiers do when they come home. Those are really good questions to ask, a challenge to answer, and so much food for thought.

Then there was a good gap before I made the next girl, I started one other but I did not finish her as of yet. But the Ego- Clown had to come out.

Everybody has one of those, but he might take on different shapes for others. For me this is him, the opposite of the light inside, the part that whispers of anxieties and torture of the consciousness. He is the part of all of us that tells us we are not good enough, can never be good enough or how could anybody ever love such a thing as us? Unfortunately he is very strong, and the phrase “exercising your ego” is entirely accurate here, the more we use the clowns thought patterns, the more we exercise him, the stronger he gets. 

I am not so foolish as to think I could ever get rid of him. We all need our egos, our ego helps us navigate society more or less successfully, we can not do without him. But needing him does not mean he has the right to take liberties with our sanity!

And the last one for today is a positive one, it is inspired by Willowing, but I made it before I took any of her classes, I had just watched a couple of her videos on YouTube. She has a painting “The Happy Traveller”, where she uses an animal we feel drawn to, and since I love to draw and paint Octopuses I went for a mermaidy look. This is very much a mixed media painting using watersoluble crayons, acrylic paints, marker, watercolour marker and gel pens.