Resources – Anndelize: Visual Artist

10 Creative Ideas

September 2, 2018 by anndelize, posted in How To, Inspiration, Resources, Tips

Lazy Sundays. Those are the best kind. It’s also the perfect time to get your art on! Below are 10 ideas to inspire your creativity today.

Organise your art supplies. Need inspiration? See what this art blogger did.
Visit an art gallery or museum today, take a friend with you.
Paint a rock, leave it somewhere in your neighbourhood for someone else to find. Inspired by The Kindness Rocks Project. Check them out!
Spend time doing some Art Journaling. Here are 10 ideas to get you started.
Do you enjoy adult colour-in pages? Here’s a link to 15 free printable colour-in pages.
Paper Mâché! Learn how to make your own with these awesome paper mâché recipes.
Perhaps you’d prefer to spend time in the garden? In that case here are 34 inspiring ideas to create your own inexpensive and easy garden art today.
Or perhaps you’d like to make your own rubber stamps? Find out how here.
Want to paint a portrait? Here is a great step-by-step guide to paint a portrait in oils. For beginners.
Perhaps you’d like to improve your drawing skills. This blog article shares 7 tips to improve your drawings.

How will you ‘art’ today? Happy Sunday everyone!

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A Creative Life

August 29, 2018 by anndelize, posted in Analysis, Research, Resources, Reviews

As I was reading journal article called A Creative Life by Susan Brandeis I saw more and more parallels between artists and shamans. This is not the first time that similarities between the two have become apparent to me.

In Shamanism the practitioner experiences a spiritual ‘calling.’ Ignoring this places the shaman at risk of illness and/or madness. So too with the artist, it is only in the creative process that the deep restlessness that haunts us finds stillness and calm through expression.

This reminded me too of a TED Talk by author Elizabeth Gilbert who delivered one of the most inspiring and powerful talks on the elusiveness of creativity. She described those moments of inspiration as a freight train rushing by, demanding the artist to drop everything else in pursuit of this ‘train.’ Sometimes requiring us to reach out and grab it with both hands in an attempt to ‘pull back’ the creative thoughts so that we can record or process them before they are gone. In her article Brandeis speaks of imagination and creativity, working hand-in-hand; she addresses the importance of the brainstorming process and the need to engage fully in this in order to reach moments of clarity and creative enlightenment.

Like the shaman who walks between two worlds, the world of the living and the world of the dead, so too do artists operate between consciousness and subconsciousness; the latter from which many ideas and connections are born. It is however futile to ‘chase the train’ unless the artist is willing to regularly engage in free range thought processes like brainstorming. Relinquishing control and surrendering to the process is what is required to conceive ideas and inspiration from which to create good art and to find the many possibilities and connections that the original ideas can be linked to. This is the realm in which originality is born through extension of ideas and processes.

References:
Brandeis, S. 2007. A Creative Life. Surface Design Journal. Vol 31(2), pp 6-11.

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Studio Practice Hours – freebie

January 31, 2016 by anndelize, posted in Freebie, Resources

Artists and art students like me have to plan our time well. We’re all juggling many different tasks daily. Our families, our work and even our social lives take up big chunks of our time. In order to create art we need to allocate time for studio practice. We’re only artists if we actually create art!

To achieve this I allocate a set amount of hours per week that I plan to spend in studio, I slot my studio hours in daily. Some days mornings in studio work best for me, other days I allocate a few hours in the afternoon. Here is a handy Studio Practice Hours roster that can be adapted to your schedule. Simply download (right click to save the image to your hard drive), print and laminate. Use a whiteboard marker to record the time you plan to be in studio daily and try to stick to it.

Tip: Place this on your studio door to let others in your household know when you’re unavailable.

In response to the WP Daily Prompt: Key Takeaway

Tools of our (artistic) trade

November 20, 2015November 24, 2015 by anndelize, posted in Resources

In this week’s blog post I draw attention to three artist resources that I have created on my site in the hope that some of my readers may find this useful. Resources such as these are the tools, the ‘cutlery’ of our trade.

Material Investigations

I investigated how to use foreign currency and bubble wrap in two separate posts that can be found here

Part of planning an artwork involves getting to know the materials we might consider using in that work, experimenting with methods to manipulate and alter those materials to gain different effects.

Artist Research

I’ve updated the artist research page with more work from other artists. These can be found here

Investigating how other artists approach a project, what materials they use and their intention behind an artwork serves to inform and inspire me when I contemplate a new artwork.