The values captured in art shouldn’t remain in the museum - they should go with us into the playroom. 

- Alain de Botton, Art as Therapy

despite it all [im still here]

This is me trying a different style. It's worked okay, I think. I started out purely with my fingers, rubbing them onto the soft pastels and smearing onto the paper (it's just cheap construction paper). Really I wanted to stick with fingers and smearing, but it got to a point where I couldn't get what I wanted, so I used a charcoal pencil to get the lines right. And a chunky stick of willow charcoal on its side and more smearing with my fingers. So now there's charcoal all over my phone. Oh well...

(Warning - real life coming up... maybe just look at the pretty art and don't read it?)

This drawing was good therapy, because I've been waiting for a result from a biopsy my son had - and the result came back today non-sinister which is a massive relief, but I actually find it hard to believe because no one's ever going to say to me, 'oh, actually it wasn’t cancer, you'll be fine.' I get my three-monthly scan result next week. Still, better me than him. I know how to deal with my own crap, pretty much - throw a whole load of writing and reading and drawing at it... basically hide in fandom. It works, mostly.

Caravaggio, detalle de “Judith y Holofernes” :: [Gwyllm Llwydd]

* * * *

“We are not transparent to ourselves. We have intuitions, suspicions, hunches, vague musings, and strangely mixed emotions, all of which resist simple definition. We have moods, but we don’t really know them. Then, from time to time, we encounter works of art that seem to latch on to something we have felt but never recognized clearly before. Alexander Pope identified a central function of poetry as taking thoughts we experience half-formed and giving them clear expression: “what was often thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” In other words, a fugitive and elusive part of our own thinking, our own experience, is taken up, edited, and returned to us better than it was before, so that we feel, at last, that we know ourselves more clearly.” — Alain de Botton, Art as Therapy

 [exhaled-spirals]

Very silly and impromptu Spot doodle.

"Corner."

(Page 12.)

Trauma art

Started a new project along the same lines of the Buggre Alle This Bible I did. Calling this one The Book of Mariam (if you know my first name, it makes sense), and it will have similar Illuminated Manuscript canvases based on themes from Good Omens season 2.

That's the cover, above. Rose colors based on the dozen roses that Chewy (yes, the company) sent us in sympathy for our cat's passing. Good people there.

It's already got a ridiculous amount of tassels I've made so far, with more to come. The far right one glows in the dark. NEV-AR EV-AR buy glow in the dark embroidery thread; when you cut it, it explodes. That tassel has so much hairspray on it, it stays straight upside down. Jeeminy Cheebidy, I do these things to myself on purpose.

Thoughts on Grief: a Minizine.

Gestalt

To view me as known Understood because you've heard the pieces that made me Assigned Judged Determined A forest where you only stare at the trees I've never met a person I could describe this way To assume you know others You claim others can know you in kind I know that I am more than the sum of my parts I know that you are, too

Art compensates us for certain inborn weaknesses, in this case of the mind rather than the body, weaknesses that we can refer to as psychological frailties.

- Alain de Botton, Art as Therapy

give yourself grace

Ended up just tweaking things today. I know some things are still off - mainly that front section. It's angled down too much but I daren't just erase it all. This house is a struggle of perfectionism, to be honest. I wish I could just recreate it in spirit, and put pen to paper without care for the details and the proportions and the angles. I wish I didn't have to be so rigid about it. But here we are. It's gorgeous in its many details and I just want to do right by it.

It's a good day for art therapy!

Practice this method of drawing to improve your skills; reap calming benefits of the mind 💆

understand some of us make art not because we think we’re particularly good at it but because the only other option is a felony

"Sometimes."

(Page 10.)