Tag: stencils

  • Word of the Year

    Word of the Year

    I can’t remember if I wrote about it here, or not, but I had been pondering my 2025 Word of the Year, and I came up with the phrase Take Up Space. I let that compost for a while to see if something else came up, or a different way of framing it arrived, but…

  • It’s Just Paper

    It’s Just Paper

    Paint made it onto canvas today, and I have a first sketch down. I realised today that my brain had somehow started subscribing to the idea that I must paint deeply meaningful paintings, and that I was treating canvases as if they are made of gold. Fascinating the way the inner critic can weedle its…

  • Patterns

    Patterns

    I’m still playing with ideas for the painting I want to do, and working things out in my sketchbook. I got some new stencils today, so a couple of them went straight into the mix. I think I just need to put some paint on the canvas and get on with it tbh. Til the…

  • Mini Monoprints

    Mini Monoprints

    I’m using a little 9x14cm Art Creation sketchbook with my 2×3″ gel plate. (yes, I’m bilingual as far as measurements go, never going to change). It started out as a project in the Things To Do When Creativity Seems Blocked – one of several tricks that I try to remember as good ways to get…

  • Happy Accident

    Happy Accident

    I’m not feeling wordy today, or perhaps it’s more that if I start, I won’t stop. This is a painting I started today, and I love the happy accident of the daisy in the eye. Til the morn, Suzanne 241/300

  • Wonky

    Wonky

    I got stuck in with a few things today, and made some progress in an old sketchbook that I really want to complete. It’s turning into an interesting mish mash of ideas, and a sourcebook I’m going to set the goal that it’s done by Samhain, so I think that’s around a page a day.…

  • Blue Hair Day

    Blue Hair Day

    Today I did some studio housekeeping, tidying overgrown piles, washing some gesso brushes, putting manky water in the cat litter bucket. Very glamourous. Then I worked in some sketchbooks, and procrastinated about virtually everything, and it was not creative or productive procrastination, it was unadulterated overwhelm at the state of the world. Eventually I got…

  • Pulling

    Pulling

    Today I got a wee parcel with two gel plates from a brand I haven’t tried before, so that was a nice way to get back into the studio and mess about with paints. I’ll have to give them a few sessions before I can decide whether they are like for like, or an improvement,…

  • Horsing Around

    Horsing Around

    I was musing to myself the other day about the idea of blogging every day, and whether I wanted to continue after the 200th day or not. It seemed like a good cut-off point to decided whether to end my streak, or whether to carry on. I weighed up the pros and cons of doing…

  • Analogous

    Analogous

    The absolute privilege of being able to shut myself off from the world for a couple of hours and just play with paint, make absolutely terrible portraits, and have my biggest existential dilemma be whether I want to be a person who has clean stencils, or a person who has gorgeoulsy grungey stencils is not…

  • Space to Dream

    Space to Dream

    An artist I admire posted a photo of her studio on social media the other day, and it was absolutely stappit fu with finished paintings. Colour everywhere, lots of different sizes and substrates. It looked absolutely amazing. I looked at that photo and saw goals – having a body of work that overwhelms my space,…