Trying to learn Mindfulness: My beginning

November 21, 2016Leave a comment

Stop the bandwagon, I want to get on!

One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog was I needed a space to record what I was doing. I am increasingly aware that what I enjoy the most about drawing, is the way it lets me experience my own life in a more focused way; really looking at my surroundings, ways of responding to what I see and feel and a way to capture my feelings. For a long long time I have been bogged down by getting it perfect. If I’m doing a life drawing, it has to be exact. I have to capture everything in front of my exactly as I see it or it’s a failure. The pressure of being this perfect has caused me to not want to even start. I know that art is a process, the final images is built up of layers the artist creates through many different decisions, following what their own instinct/ experience is guiding them to choose as they go through their process. I KNOW this and yet…my mind cannot start for fear of being lost and getting it ‘wrong’.

I like to go onto a location and sketch what’s around me and I like to go off script when I do manage it, adding my own imaginative details, making it my own. I don’t make time for this often, it’s a habit I’ve been trying to cultivate for years but my comfort zone doesn’t seem to extend into this area and the habits never stick. It’s so much easier to just snap a photo right? Right, which is why I have a ridiculous amount of photos I have rarely used to draw from.

I have to change. Which is where mindfulness comes into play. I’ve been looking into it for a while, and by looking into I mean reading random posts in pinterest…I read the book ‘Flow’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which seemed to cover some principles of it, looking at how our lives are shaped by where our attention is focused. I signed up to a free online course in Mindfulness and got to week 4 before I stopped making time for it and just gently let my hand fall open and allowed it to drift away from me.

So frustrating!

What I want to achieve is to be more aware of when and where my attention drifts, to change my attitude and achieve some more self-management so I can finally achieve those goals I’ve been setting myself. To stop over thinking and analysing everything that passes through my mind. The fear of change I think is one of life’s biggest stumbling block and boy, does it have a hold of me! I’m so comfy just talking about my want of change, sitting at the beginning before the possibility of getting it ‘wrong’ can come to pass. How do I change from being comfortable to being actively curious enough to move? In my head I have decided that NOW is the time I will do it. I go to sleep, I get up and hey presto, my mind wanders away from the uncomfortable and into my same old routine. Any thoughts that do surface get squished into the ‘to do’ list for tomorrow. Tbh, that’s a pretty long list at the minute…

Now don’t get me wrong, I know I have some very good company with me right now, many people have this dilemma and come to the same response as me. It’s why we put up with the boring jobs because we all know that ‘someday soon’ we won’t be there, we’ll be pursuing our dream of ‘whatevertheheckiwasputonthisplanetfor’ and finally our real lives will start…Ugh, it’s so sad to see it in writing because the answer is so obvious. Someday never comes if you don’t move on from what you’re doing today and do something different.

I want some day now. I want to travel and explore the world with my creative practice and share this with everyone and make people’s lives better but I have to start with me. The me right now is standing on page one of the book she wants to write with a whole wheelbarrow full of tools she’s been hoarding but never using.

I had this thought the other day when walking to my work…” If I don’t do it, it won’t exist for me.” If I don’t change my routine, it will never be full of the new things I want to exist in my world. I will never experience them. I will never ever have them. Not a one.

Mindfulness is one of these things. Chapter One: Learn to be Mindful…How do I do this again?

I’m starting with the book ‘Wherever you go there you are.’ by Jon Kabat-Zinn (it was the first one that looked interesting in my library). I need to get some starting pointers and i can’t get it all from pinterest. I also want to follow some blogs that talk about Mindfulness so if anyone that manages to get to the end of this blog post (I realise it’s quite lengthy right now) has any recommendations, please fire away in the comments section below!

Phew, I needed to get that out there! I hopefully won’t emotionally rant too much on this blog but if anyone is feeling the same as me right now, it would be a real comfort to hear from you in the comments section!

Explore: Visiting the multi faith centre

November 21, 2016November 21, 2016Leave a comment

My thoughts before the visit… It’s Wednesday and I’m pretty tired from work and its politics and processes. A chance email alerted me to the opportunity to visit the Multi-faith centre at the local University to watch ‘In the footsteps of Francis and the Sultan‘ a story from the crusade war about a Christian Monk and a Muslim Sultan accepting each other’s faith.

My current routine doesn’t have many links to religion, I don’t practice a particular faith but I was curious about what the story was and how it would be presented. I like random, serendipitous events but I think you have to accept the nudge when it happens to experience them. This week has been a hard one, the past months have been difficult in the world. Faith in politics is feeling thin to a lot of people right now. I’m watching from my new spot in the blog world and seeing other bloggers upset and confused about where to go now with Trump as president. He’s not my president, it’s not my country but I feel an echo of their horror and helplessness. The world feels overwhelming and terribly small at the same time, with these massive changes taking place and yet my life continues with its usual routine.

It was on a whim that I decided to go to a film that looked at harmony between different viewpoints instead of the fight between them.

So, I get changed and eat a quick dinner before heading out to the Centre. I hope to meet interesting, insightful people, be uplifted by the film and find something to share relating to this current world situation. A way through the confusion or at least some happier thoughts. Selfishly, I also want to find a story from this event that I could create into a comic strip to practice my skills. Finding inspiration from real life events causes the stories and feelings to be richer and more relatable than something I try to concoct just in my head.

The dark grey of winter is already pressing in and I hurry through the cold night, feeling excited to break my routine a little.

After the event…

So, you know when you make a decision and it just rings true? You feel super happy, you make connections with people that are the same as you, there’s just a great positive vibe around everything involved..?

So I turn up at the centre and there’s a sign on the door saying there’s a Board meeting taking place. Bit intimidating but there’s a reception and leaflets and anyone’s allowed to go and look at leaflets right? So I wander over and get my bearings and a friendly voice asks me if I’m ok and my standard response of “Yes, thankyou, I’m fine.” just jumps automatically out of my mouth. I’m clearly feeling awkward as I’m staring at some leaflets, late at night, in a multi-faith centre…damn automatic politeness!

Anyway, I manage to walk my body into the room and there’s bookcases (instantly puts me at ease), 2 tables full of cake and a big water kettle for tea. Friendly faces welcome me in and I find a seat with them. It’s not as busy as I expected and we’re watching it on a pull up screen and projector but I like it. It’s not intimidating and I happily chat with the people there as we take tea and cake. I later learn that one of the cakes is made by someone’s 4 year old granddaughter. It all feels very human.

We watch the film with a break in the middle for a refresher of more tea and cake (priorities). I don’t watch many religious documentaries, as I can’t get away from the feeling of propaganda with them, but it was interesting to learn about the different history. How over the generations the stories have changed and how images have warped peoples view of it, depending upon their historical context. The core of the story was that each man saw the complete faith the other had in their own religion and understood they could not change to follow their own. Instead they looked for the similarities the religions had with each other and built on these, taking the good ideas they saw and bringing them into their own faith.

I watched it and kinda thought “well d’uh, that’s how problem solving work to get progress”. I get the feeling that with feelings of faith and religion, people don’t like progress. Change means becoming something different and what most people want is for others to be more like them, without them changing to be more like the other. Once you’ve changed by adding something new to your faith, you’re no longer part of the community that hasn’t moved along with you. You become an outsider from your own faith and that is a scary place to find yourself. Apparently Francis didn’t care though, which is why he still has a strong following going through the world and is considered a friendly badass (well, the film certainly showed him as such anyway.)

After the film we had an interesting discussion about the history of the crusades (there were 5 wars apparently…I really suck at history…) from a religious historian and about the difficulties communities are facing in the current climate of change and peoples response to it. This discussion was interesting as we had a range of faith backgrounds and levels of knowledge (from the University Chaplain to mindfulness workshop leader to a random illustrator). It would have been nicer to have had the opportunity for more Muslim input but we were a group of 8 and the majority were Christians.

One of the key ideas from the discussion that I thought summed it nicely, was that people are valuable as they are. The idea that people’s own faith and experience is valuable and needs to be respected by others. That it doesn’t need to be changed and treated like something sub-human and so not worthy of human rights if it’s not the same at your own. Fear of change is a powerful motivator to destroy anything that looks to rock your life’s status quo; but progress is only really achieved when people step outside their rational thoughts that have been formed by their current ideas and accept a few new ones. It’s rational to be scared of the new and the unknown, especially when the news outlets are making it appear like there’s no other choice. It’s irrational to welcome with open arms something that everyone has labelled as different and scary, when you don’t know what to expect from it.

I just googled the definition of ‘irrational’ to ensure this was the correct word to use here (I had Inigo Montoya’s voice in my head whispering ” You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”) and the definition I got was the following “without or deprived of normal mental clarity or sound judgment.” Sounds about right to me. If you base your judgement on Facebook news or scaremongering tactics of the tabloids though, it’s not a sound judgement.

The best way to make a rational judgement is to go out and explore the new for yourself and make up your own mind from the experiences you have. You may not like it, it may confirm everything you were scared of, but you are making the judgement. Not the press. And that is so important when you are figuring out somethings value and how you want to act.

What’s it all about then?

November 15, 20163 Comments

Introducing BlogCat! all-about-1-laura-mossop

I now see that a blog is not just for a rainy wednesday afternoon but for life if you let it. I started this blog a few months back and have posted a few times, figured out the template i’d chosen, uploaded some pictures to try and make it look like my kind of home. Somewhere i’d like to hang out if i was wandering the internet. I’m still at the bricks and mortar stages with this blog but my mind keeps spinning ideas of what I want to write about, skills I could learn and experiences to share with you all. It won’t leave me alone but I hadn’t made room in my routine for it. It’s like a cat at the bottom of my garden, staring at me through my kitchen window, waiting for me to add a catflap to the backdoor so it could come in and be part of my life.

What my blogcat keeps meowing at me to write about are fun things that I want to get into the habit if doing or even try once. I want to keep a sketch diary about my life, I want to make notes as I walk through my environments to help my art, I want to experiment with different techniques, find books by other artists and explore their styles and advice. I want to go on long walks with interesting people, explore new cities and capture the feeling it gives me. I want to figure out this UrbanSketching thing and then help others figure it out aswell. I want to help share information I find, as i’m continuously researching into new areas. Basically, I want this blog to be my home with a library full of my stories and my readers to be wandering cats looking for a lovely place to warm up and stay.

I also want to be a wandering cat and visit other blogs and meet new blogcat friends who like to travel, create art and practice mindfulness. I’m just starting to learn how to incorporate this philosophy into my thoughts, so finding others is going to be helpful in keeping me going on track.

So I need to build. I’m currently reading the instructions ( part of my procrastination habit guys, its useful but don’t be fooled. No one needs to read 5 books on blogging before actually starting….). I’ve signed up to WordPress’s University course on the fundamentals to help give me an initial kick start. I’m looking at my normal routine and finding time to protect, time where i can squirrel myself away and just focus on creating something that brings me joy.

I recently read an article about how blogging is dying. Social media is thriving but long blog posts are not as common due to the new platforms available that places higher emphasis on the bitesize pieces for readers to digest. I sat and read my facebook feed the other day and afterwards I had a list of maybe 10 pieces of small sized, random chunks of information that don’t really connect up to much. Half of them I didn’t really care to learn about anyway but had a catchy title that hooked me in. The other half I found vaguely interesting and there was maybe 2 bitesize bits of information that I actually wanted to remember. Bitesize media platforms make you full but not on quality and is a really tiring experience to me.

I’m late getting into the blogging game but I intend to enjoy my experience in creating my home here.

Overview of walking Dovedale to Milldale in Derbyshire Part 1

October 11, 2016October 11, 2016Leave a comment

I think this walk is a classic! This is the one that me and my partner always go to when we want to get out into the fresh air, it’s ridiculously popular at certain points of the year and almost everyone I know in Derbyshire has done it.

Part 1 : Facilities

Let’s talk the basics guys, with regards to car parking we got there early at about 10am and the car park was pretty empty, by the time we had made it back at 2pm it was completely full with cars backed up all the way to the main road, about a quarter of a mile back. Brutal if you have a car full of kids and really need to pee….

There is a small cabin in the car park that sells ice creams and some drinks but no proper food. The toilets are well looked after and your standard public toilets to be honest, nothing fancy but exactly what you want when your desperate for a pee!

The walk is relatively flat with a couple of hills half way through, although there’s always a path to follow and steps to help you climb them. I will say that initially the walk on the left hand side of the river can get muddy and a bit awkward with loose stones and on the right hand side there is a proper path. You can cross the river at the stepping stones later on and the path stays clear from there but if you have a buggy or wheelchair I don’t recommend trying to cross the stones. The rivers not that deep but it’s fast and not worth the risk!

Once you get to Milldale there is a small village there that has a small tuckshop that sells hot food and snacks, i don’t think it’s open all year, thought it was open in February when we went.

I’ve created some sketches from my photos of the day, i’m still pretty new to landscape painting so have much to learn but i’m hoping with this practice i’ll get to a stage I can be proud of. All pictures were done with watercolours on cartridge paper. I hope you like them and if you have any sketches of your own, please share a link in the comment section below!

QUAD Digital Participation Course 2015

August 3, 2016July 24, 2016Leave a comment

As I write this blog post, the digital participation course that has set me on this fantastic digital journey is coming to an end. Although the structured workshops will be stopping, the support from QUAD will still be there as we continue to explore and develop our creative practice.

The course has been developed and was delivered by Derby QUAD in partnership with local and national arts and cultural organisations, such as FACT, First Movement, Pervasive Media Studio at Watershed and TATE Britain.

On Monday the 16th we all took our work to London to the TATE Britain‘s digital studio to present at a show and tell event they hosted. This was an incredible opportunity and we had a fantastic day with the support of Luca and the teams from the Tate. I wanted to explore with them the possibilities when incorporating participation into the live digital drawing process of an artist. Instead of passively watching the artist work, the viewers are able to engage and direct the work and become a resource for the artist just as the artist becomes a tool to create with for the viewer.

The aim of the course was to help artists develop their creative practice by learning about new technology and participation skills and how this can enhance their work. The key element here was not to change their practice to purely digital or to add bells and whistles for the hell of it, but to use technology in an informed way to move their work forward and to help viewers engage with their work in new ways.

My creative practice comes from traditional drawing/painting skills, using traditional and digital media to create artworks for print or web-based use. I wanted to explore more about getting these 2D images out into the world for people to interact with, not just look at.

I had always wanted to do workshops but lacked the confidence to give it a go. Well, through the course i was able to run my own workshops as well as support other artists through a range of different activities and this has then given me the confidence to now organise and run my own workshops.I have since created workshops that incorporated drawing and creating with 3d printing, ipad drawing, and photography.

Watercolour Architecture – Using digital software to plan a traditional painting

July 31, 2016October 11, 2016Leave a comment

As an artist, i’m happy to use any tools that help me create my artistic vision. Over the centuries artists have been pretty amazing at creating simple tools to translate the incredibly complex world around them. The viewfinder is a perfect example of this, as is the plumbline: a rectangle with a hole in it and a piece of string with a weight on the end. Awesome.

But, the user still needs to understand the proces of using these simplistic tools. If you don’t understand the idea of negative shapes or how to find a good composition, a viewfinder is not going to make you an artist. It’ll make you into someone looking at the world through the hole in a rectangle.

Digital tools come under this same class for me, although I appreciate they are more complicated to work at times then the trusty viewfinder. For my most recent paintings of Kedleston Hall I wanted to focus on the architecture and how light plays off the different planes of the building. I didn’t want to just draw a fancy house, I wanted to add my own creative flair and vision to what I saw.
So, I kept my colour palette simple. Like, really simple. Three colours in total to create each painting, which would keep things nice and harmonious so I could concentrate on the interesting compositions instead.

In photoshop I adjusted a reference photo to play with tonal contrast and composition, the best way I find to do this is when it’s in black and white. Then I go back to the original photo and play around with colour. This helps me visualise lots of different combinations. Doing it digitally like this is a lot faster then trying to do it with traditional mediums, plus I can tweak them cleanly. The last image above has been pixelated so its easier to focus purely on the range of colours and no the compositions details.

Once I have my colours sorted, I can then choose which colours to have in my palette. From there I do a small mock up to help me figure out the best way to apply them and to get me used to mixing the colours. Then, when I come to create the final painting, i’ve already done all my prep so a lot of the stress has been taken away and I can relax and enjoy the painting process.

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Starting to do VJing or how to set-up live digital art events

July 29, 2016July 24, 2016Leave a comment

I want to quickly show you one of my first live art events, how it was set up and how I engaged people in the content. When I do live art events, I want to incorporate participation into the events entertainment and have this effect the structure of my live art. It’s so much more interesting for me when i don’t know what images i’ll be working on at each event!

By live art I mean digital/traditional painting that is done infront of the audience instead of a pre-made recording or animation. I know the term VJing is used alot for big events with artists working live but i’m not sure I fall into this catgory yet. I probably do but for now I like the term live art as I think it suits it better.

The event:
For the RoCH: Fans and Legends launch event at QUAD a couple of months back, I created a set-up where i created a backdrop and then asked the audience to take photos of themselves in dynamic poses and email these photos to me. I would then incorporate these photos into the scene infront of them, redesigning how they looked to fit the event theme of martial arts.

It was a fun session to do and there was a lot of participation, laughter and opportunity for the audience to come and talk to me as I worked.

The Set-up
The set up was very low tech, I had my laptop with photoshop, my wacom tablet, a projector and a screen to project onto. And a wifi connection as well, this is an important aspect as if I can’t get the photos people are sending me, I don’t have a resouce to work with. Kinda awkward…

One of the main things to bare in mind when you’re first looking into doing this, is the projectors lumen number. The higher this is, the better quality the image is going to be once projected and it also decides how powerful the projector will be. For the small scale set-up I had I didn’t have to be too picky, the projector just had to be good enough to see the details and colours and it was only projecting a short way so power wasn’t an issue either. If you want to project outside or onto a building, then you’ll need to look into higher powered projectors.

Instructables has a few great tutorials for outside projecting and its definately something i’ll be looking to do next year.

You can see from the photos that the event was a success and it helped me to understand how people like to engage with this kind of artwork. It was fascinating for me to see others so interested in the various brushes setting and image editing tools, which for me have become somewhat boring due to using them so often. Seeing how people enjoyed watching the image develop reaffirmed to me that this way of doing live art is something I want to keep exploring.

Derby Museums Exhibition: EVERYONE

July 27, 2016July 24, 2016Leave a comment

Derby Museum and Gallery did a call out for artworks responding to the theme EVERYONE – Your place in the world. I have never responded to an artist call out before and I felt that this would be a lovely starter exhibition to enter.

As I want to develop my place to be outside painting, I chose an area of Derbyshire that I particularly liked, Dovedale in Ilam and created a design from a photo I recently took there. Obviously lots of deep thought going on for the idea behind this piece! Sometimes it’s nice just to paint your view of a place, which is what I set out to do here.

I sketched two designs first to give myself some practice and generate how I wanted the scene to look. The top once was too cold but quite cold to the actual colours, and the bottom one was a tad too psychadelic but I liked the idea of addng characters to the composition to give the view someone to connect to. I then sketched the design onto canvas! I’ve included below my rouch sketchbook pages to see the process i went through. Nothing very complicated but it helped to get my thoughts in order and I could figure out what colours mixed well with others and how I could eliminate other colour options that would ruin the balance of the piece.

I used Gouache as my medium as i’m used to watercolours but I want to learn more about how to layer opaque paints, making Gouache the perfect middle ground. They were very easy to wipe off though at the beginning when I was adding new layers but eventually I got my under painting to how I wanted the colour structure to go.

From there I just kept on refining the detail! I wish I had a good reference for a person in this kind of light but ended up having to work from memory and imagination ( dangerous combo when trying to get things looking realistic! ) and the final piece didn’t look too odd thankfully. I used some interactive acrylics for some colours I couldn’t make with my Gouache and for some of the whites.

On Being scared to sketch

July 24, 2016July 24, 2016Leave a comment

I think this predicament is common and that it’s something that many professional and hobby artists deal with and that yes, it does get easier in time but not with age (as we know when watching children sketch…They’re so darn carefree!). Something I have been dealing with for a long time is why, even though I love art and get inspired by nature and constantly look at other artworks and read various art books, I don’t draw and paint half as much as I should. Why all the procrastination? Why all the anxiety and fear at the beginning? What’s the deal brain, I thought this was what you wanted to do!

Silly brain…I think it’s just overwhlemed. By inadvertantly putting pressure on what i’m about to produce, my vision and thoughts that i’m going to capture by drawing, by judging it before i’ve even made a mark….I create a dream artwork before the real artwork even has a chance to begin to create itself and it will never match up to all the half formed ideas that are in my head, merging together.

I think the best thing to do when you’re scared to even start to sketch is to stop thinking of it as a finished piece of artwork and think of it as an exploratory journey. What am I looking at? What an interesting leaf! The way there is a rhythm going through all the branches is relaxing to look at, how does it look if I try to capture it with these kind of marks. Hm, not so good, i’ll make a note of that and remember it for the next sketch I do. How big are these leaves compared to the ones in the background? How will my mark-making change? How much space do they take up compared to the foreground leaves?

Knowing different drawing techniques is still a must, but sometimes we forget that they’re just advice to help us, things people have learnt in the past through trial and error and have passed along as a good way of achieving a particular task. As an artist, you’re allowed to have your own trial and errors and to find your own way of capturing things that you’ve discovered on your own exploratory journeys. The creative jumps and experiments that you make based on your own tastes and judgements help to create new processes.

So don’t be scared to start sketching, there isn’t a need for fear or anxiety here, just curiousity and a desire for discovery. Plus, you don’t have to show anyone if you don’t want to but it can fun to chat about your discoveries and errors with other artists. Share the journey you’re both on and laugh at things that didn’t go quite right but look kinda funny now…

First blog post

June 28, 2016June 28, 2016Leave a comment

This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it.