Summer hasn’t been all fun and games, though happily there was enough of that to make it feel like summer, but now it’s time to push forward on the creative front.
Above are two digital pieces, the top not yet complete. I found some movie stills as reference material because they help me think about the whole scene, rather than just the characters. And figures in movie stills do more natural looking things than when you are working from a model, or from most photographs.
Happy autumn everyone. Another time for growth, but of a different kind.
I feel as though I’ve talked about this before, but I took a quick browse through my previous post titles and didn’t come up with anything. So…
On the Big Five personality test, I show up as a strong introvert. I didn’t need a test to tell me that. I can spend massive amounts of time alone, and enjoy it, and I get very antsy in crowds.
But people are born to community. In times past it was a matter of survival—still is! We all need other people whether we’re introverted or extroverted.
In the past, I could get my extroverting done at my day job, and I guarded my alone time with a jealousy that may not have been entirely healthy.
Here’s the thing: When I spend a large amount of time with other people I lose myself. Yes, I know how weird that sounds, but truly, when I’m alone again, I can’t figure out who I am and where I left off. I can’t get back into the groove. I feel as though there are bits of me scattered all over the place, and I can’t gather enough of the pieces to make a coherent me.
I come to the studio, or to my writing desk, and I sit, and sit, and don’t know what I’m doing or how to begin. It’s similar to ‘page fright’—a fear of the blank canvas or a blank sheet of paper—but it’s not the same. In page fright, you’re afraid of messing up. I’m not afraid of messing up the page, I just don’t know what to do with the page, or canvas, or brush or pen.
In early March I went to Ottawa, Ontario to visit family. I had a wonderful time, but though I’ve been home for ten days now, and itching to get back to my work, it wasn’t until this weekend that I was finally able to put enough of the pieces of me together to do some creative work.
There are rhythms and reasons for everything. This is part of a creative rhythm for me and usually it’s best just to go with the flow.
Raven Girl, 2019 ink, digital print on altered book.
It’s c-c-c-old! It’s ‘extreme temperature’ warnings cold. When I start the car this morning, every warning light cames on: check engine, brakes warning (!), others… My away mission is necessarily cancelled. I should mind. I don’t. Did I mention it’s cold?
In truth, I’m being a baby. It is cold, but I’ve lived in the middle of Canada my whole life and it’s been colder. This is an area of temperature extremes. It can be +40 Celsius in summer and -40 Celsius in the winter. Today, it’s only -28 C. Could be worse.
Above are another two pages from my altered book. I drew the picture of the little girl and the ravens from a photo reference. Do you know the covers of Ransom Rigg’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children? They’re amazing, and just a little bit creepy. I wanted that kind of feel.
This is a digital drawing. (I use an opensource software called Krita (which is amazing) and a Huion display drawing tablet.(also amazing)), I then printed the drawing on mat photo paper.
To prepare the book page I used a mixture of Higgens sepia ink and Liquitex permanent black ink to cover the print part of the book. Then with glue, more ink, and a terrific Jelly Roll gel pen, in gold, I put it all together. Some things came out as expected. Some didn’t, but the accidents were happy ones. When I put glue on the back of my digital print, it dampened the front of the image enough to turn the sepia tone green. It works. I’ll take it.
The raven girl is pretty stoic looking in her strangeness. Me too, pretty stoic. It doesn’t stop me thinking of plants and gardens though. So I finished the weekend off with this:
Eve Barbeau 