Today’s postcard from my studio is a fun little study where I used my face as a reference, but I wasn’t too concerned about likeness. I’ve been doing that in recent days as a way to get the hand moving and the eyes looking without having to fumble about deciding what I’m going to do. I find that if I just start, then other things flow from the first page. The juices start flowing.
This is what sketchbooks are for, and I think for a long time I didn’t see my sketchbooks as workbooks, places where pages can just be, as they are, unresolved, unfinished, unsightly. I don’t think the age of Instagram helped with this form of perfectionism, because it’s absolutely loaded with videos of perfect work-of-art pristine sketchbooks, and those are not what I make.
There are different ways of approaching a sketchbook – art journals, themed books, and artist books, but the one that seems to get the least fanfare and attention is the workbook, and I think these books are much more interesting, even if it has taken me years to figure this out for myself.
I have two books that are very close to being filled, and one of them is very old, and I had this narrative in my head that I must finish it because I want to move on and have something current, but then I flipped through it, and looked at it with a different perspective, and there are a lot of ideas in there that are still relevant to me, and I realised that my delightful Inner Critic just really likes to do my art a disservice in any way she can find to get a hook in.
A lot of my practise is about practising letting the perfectionist, critical, really quite boring inner voice waffle on while I carry on painting.
Postcard for today is a follow-on from the other day when I used my fluorescent magenta for my sketch paint, and today I used fluorescent violet, because it’s a dull day out there, so the place needs brightened up.
I don’t know if the dull cloudy day is at play, or if it’s because I tried a different thing with my camera, but I can assure you this paint is much more vibrant than is showing on the image. I know I can capture the vibrancy, because I did it the other day with the fluorescent magenta, so I guess I have to experiment with that.
Anyway, here’s to all the fluorescent pinks, who needs realistic flesh tones anyway.
Til the morn,
Suzanne
201/300
Thrummie Bizzum 
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