Making Art For Art's Sake

I recently picked up two art supply subscriptions. The first one was Let's Make Art. I get a box every month with watercolor paints, paper and a design created by Sarah Cray, the artist who does the paint along videos. She does live videos and you can watch the prerecorded videos any time. These are the paintings I've done so far.

 The pickup truck was the first one I did. I haven't painted in 30 years! I did a pretty decent job. The bear was the the second one and the dog the third one. I'm in the middle of painting a forest scene and that one is about 2/3 of the way finished (the paintings can usually be done in about an hour. I'm just being lazy about that one). 


The second subscription is Sketchbox. Every month I get a box of mystery art supplies. This time it was a handful of different markers and a small 4x6 tablet of paper. This doesn't come with preset artwork to copy so I had a harder time getting started with this one because 1) I didn't know what I wanted to do and 2) my brain keeps telling me I can't sketch or draw. Clearly, my brain doesn't know what the hell it's talking about. This is what I made with those supplies.

 It was a very limited color pallet - pinks, purples, greens. The green marker is cool-it has a light/medium/dark marker all in one barrel. That's the one I used for the grapes. I'm quite surprised by the variety of things I was able to do with just those colors. 

I have to admit that the middle two (floating island and watermelon) are based on designs Sarah Cray did for the June and July Let's Make Art watercolor boxes are are not my own original ideas. All of these are just small 4x6 sketches so they're quick to make.

Then I got inspired by a photo I took years ago of tulips in the planters around the Main Street train station at Disneyland. Last night I decided to draw that.

This is done with colored pencils. I have lots of those on hand already. It doesn't look exactly like the photo I took, but really, do I want it to? It doesn't need to be photorealistic to convey the idea of tulips growing along an iron fence. I have more photos for reference that are calling to me.







I've done all this artwork over the past two months. Probably more art than I've made in the last two years! And all of it simply for the sake of making art. It's not for sale. It's not for a contest. It's not for a show. It's just about the fun of making art. 


I encourage you to make art and be creative in whatever way YOU are creative. That could be drawing or painting, or it could be baking, sewing, gardening, flower arranging, writing. organizing something or any number of other outlets. There are SO many ways to express our creative side.

Don't let anyone tell you that creativity or art is frivolous or a waste of time. The expression of creativity it vital to our wellbeing and our expression of who we are.

Be creative. And do it just for the joy of doing it! 

The Myth of Perfect

In my life I have often been treated as if my mistakes are character flaws – that I’m careless or selfish because I forgot something or I misspelled something or transposed a number somewhere-and more importantly, the implication that I’m doing it deliberately. It wasn’t until very recently I learned that everyone makes mistakes and that it’s human and normal to make mistakes (how did I NOT know this?). You have no idea how liberating it is to actually internalize that concept!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this absolves me of the consequences or gives me permission to make mistakes because I AM being deliberately careless or selfish, but it does significantly reduce some of the “I’m bad” nonsense that runs around in my head.

One of the light bulbs for me was Neil Gaiman’s 2012 Keynote Address, “Make Good Art”. This must have resonated with A LOT of people because not only did it go viral (and quotes from it still pop up in memes all the time), he made book out of it. He talks about how if you don’t feel like you can do something you should “pretend that you are someone who can do that thing, not pretend to do it, but pretend you are someone who could”. And he says “make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes”. If THAT’S not a liberating concept I don’t know what is.

I’ve heard other people (people who are famous enough to be on radio or TV or any other big public platform) say that if you’re not making mistakes you’re not learning or you’re not trying something new. They say that about pissing people off too – if you’re not pissing someone off then you’re not really doing anything. I’m still processing that one.

The problem isn’t in making mistakes, it’s in letting them defeat you rather than learning from them. There are so many things I’ve tried in my life that didn’t work out right away and I just gave up, thinking I must not be good at this or that. I never persisted long enough to find out if I could be good at it. That has been changing over the last few years (probably since 2012).

People who are considered wise (or at least quotable) have said this about perfection:

“Perfect is the enemy of good” – Voltaire

“Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without” – Confucius

“Never wait in expectation of perfection or you’ll wait forever” – J.K. Rowling

“You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something that you never finished.” – Neil Gaiman

Although these quotes can actually be applied to anything in life I’m an artist, so I often perceive them through the lens of my artistic pursuits. In 2018 I published my first book, The Art of Sigils. It’s not perfect, but it’s done and it’s out there. If I had waited to publish until it was perfect I’d still be sitting on it.

I have never really put myself “out there” to teach the things I know because I don’t consider myself an “expert” on anything (in other words, I’m not perfect) – “jack of all trades, master of none”, that’s me. Then I realized, a lot of people teach subjects that they know something about but haven’t necessarily perfected and that there are going to be people out there who actually know less than I do about any given subject and they’re the ones I can teach. Sigils, crafts and photography – these are some of the things I know well. So, this year I am setting up online and IRL classes and workshops on subjects I do know quite a lot about, though maybe not everything. And it’s not going to be perfect, but it’s going to be interesting and it’s going to be fun. And I’ll be learning from the people I teach as well. I won’t have all the answers, but if someone asks me a question and I don’t know the answer I can research it and get back to them and we both learn. If I share with people the knowledge I do have then I’m sending out ripples into the world. Sigils, crafts, photography, art I think these are good, healing ripples to send out into this increasingly chaotic and confusing world.

Make 2019 the year you give yourself permission to be creative and the year you accept that you make mistakes and learn from them rather than run from them.

(updated February 20) Workshop Dates:

Pysanka is the Ukrainian art of decorating eggs. “The word pysanka comes from the verb pysaty, "to write" or "to in scribe", as the designs are not painted on, but written (inscribed) with beeswax” – Wikipedia. If you do a search you’ll come up with beautiful, intricate images of Pysanky (plural form). Don’t let the intricacy of the designs intimidate you. It’s a simple technique and the designs are actually easy to do once you understand the step-by-step method used to make them.

I have Pysanky workshops scheduled at the following locations (please contact the stores directly to pre-register for the classes):

March 8th at The Dragon and The Rose store in Anaheim
March 9th at The Green Man Store in North Hollywood.
March 30^th & 31st (Saturday is SOLD OUT) at My Creative Outlet craft store in Chatsworth
Tentative: April (TBD) at Practical Magica store in Bellflower

I’m also in the process of scheduling Sigil Making classes (because once you learn Pysanka you can inscribe sigils on eggs with the same process)!

March 2nd I'm teaching a sigil class at Healing Oak Crystals in Simi Valley.

To be notified of future classes follow me at www.TheArtOfSigils.com or sign up for my newsletter. I also do a monthly Sigil challenge wherein I post a sigil (in the newsletter) and invite readers to do something creative with it or tell me what the sigil inspires in them. No pressure, no judging, just for fun and as a creative playdate.   

Story Imager

This is one of the first photos I ever took with a 35mm camera. Up until I bought this camera I had only used point-and-shoot – Kodak Instamatics and the like. I’d never used a camera that allowed for the immense creativity of focus, aperture and shutter settings. I had no idea what I was doing. I was just sitting on grandmother’s porch taking photos of my nephew, Jeremy, playing with soap bubbles. It may be the best photo I’ve ever taken. I still have lots more to take so the jury is still out on that.

I bought a 35mm camera to take on a trip to Hawaii with my grandmother in 1982. We had a wonderful time and I have lots of great photos of that trip, including some special photos of her and me together. 

For some reason I’ve always thought that the soap bubble photo was the beginning of my love affair with photography. As I started writing this blog I realized it started way before that. My grandfather (on my mom’s side) was always taking home movies and my parents were always taking Polaroid photos of me and my sister when we were kids. This was when you had to manually pull the film out of the big, bulky Polaroid camera, wait for it to develop, peel it off the backing paper and then swipe it with this chemical stick (that was our job) so the photo wouldn’t fade. Home movies were on 8mm film that had to be sent out to be processed and then played on a projector. A far cry from the instant gratification of photography and video now.

I think it was our grandfather who gave us our first cameras. He was always into “gadgets” and Kodak started mass marketing easy to load 125mm and 110mm cameras with cartridges that made it, more or less, foolproof for anyone to take photos. We were probably about 7 years old at the time. When we spent weekends at their house we would do chores– raking leaves (they had a huge magnolia tree in their front yard. I hated those leaves) and doing dishes to earn money to pay for the film and developing the pictures. We documented our trips with them, Arizona, Mesa Verde, Marineland. Cameras then (for us) were only for special occasions, like vacations. I probably still have those cameras packed away somewhere in my sister’s garage.

As I got older I became the the person who documents family events. I took photos at family gatherings and special events. I was the photographer at both of my sister’s weddings – the first one at home, the second one in a church.

I probably missed some of the traditional photos you’re supposed to do at a wedding (because I didn’t know any better) but it was my gift to my sister and her husband. I took behind-the-scenes photos at friends’ weddings – the stuff the professional photographer misses because they’re doing the “official” stuff. When I was in my 20s I drove my mom up to Petaluma for the wedding of her best friend’s son. In one of the photos I got during the wedding the bride had her hand on the groom’s butt. His parents LOVED that photo.

In the 80s my grandfather wanted to learn photography so we took a class together at Valley College. I thought it would give us something in common and bridge a divide that had grown between us. It didn’t. That was when I learned to love the Dark Room. I loved putting on my headphones, cranking up the music, developing film and printing photos. Funny thing, our instructor, a wedding photographer, HATED darkroom work. He enjoyed taking the photos and had an assistant for the boring (to him) work. I think that was when I started taking more photos of things, rather than people. I captured the play of light and shadow, of texture and line. I had a Disneyland Annual Passport at the time and would frequently go there just to spend the day taking photos of the plants and architecture. 

I’ve also chronicled the growing up stages of my sister’s kids. Around the time the boys became teenagers they pretty much left the room if I had a camera in hand. They indulge me now from time to time. 

For some reason people give me cameras. I don’t know where they got the idea that I COLLECT cameras, but I have the beginnings of quite a collection now.  

 There are several cameras missing from this photo – my Instamatic cameras that are packed away, two cameras that were stolen from my apartment back in the 80s and I was given a 60s Polariod Land Camera that isn't in the photo.

When digital cameras came along it was a revolution. I was FREE! Free to shoot whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted and didn’t have to wait until I had the money to buy or develop the film. I was free to experiment and if it didn’t work out I could just delete the photo - no wasted paper, film or chemicals! I was able to blog my unexpected, strange and fun trip to New York in 2010 (check the blog archives for more photos).

I could shoot all the funny, quirky things I saw as well as document my adventure in The Big Apple. In the evenings I would come back to the house I was staying in and post my photos, chronicling my day’s adventures.

For years now I’ve been shooting photos at events at work, at events for non-profit organizations of which I am a part – PPLA, The Hollywood Arts Council, The Burbank Chorale. Often the photos make their way onto Social Media, company/organization brochures and newsletters. Photography is as much a part of what sustains my life now as breathing is.

Earlier this year, I shared my adventures in Ireland with my family and friends back home (see May/June 2018 archives for more photos). I captured my generous host, Jane, without whom the adventure would not have even been possible plus beautiful vistas and cute shops and shared my days with people who were far away. I have wonderful memories of that brief time in an enchanted land.

Recently I started The Well of Images, a personal brand photography business. So far I’ve worked with an herbalist, a Hollywood Psychic, and a composer. I am thoroughly enjoying shooting personalized photos for people to use on social media and their websites that reflects their specific business, brand and personality. In so many cases small businesses are in a niche market that Stock Photography doesn’t serve well and these people love having a folder of images that are specific to what they’re blogging or writing about right at their fingertips and they don’t have to search the web for something that will “do” just so they can have an image to go with their post.They also love the ability to edit the photos (make memes, add text, crop, etc.).

I’m building this new venture into a business that will support me after I’m forced to retire or if circumstances require that I leave California for a while. It will be portable so I can do it from any base of operation. I never guessed that my hobby would become a business that I love. I never imagined that my witnessing of my family’s journey through life was training me for this.

I’m a Story Imager. I am a witness.