Three new entries

First, my calendar. I thought about things I took away from my class experience as well as what was happening in my life and, of course, with my pregnancy.












Next, I pursued last week's proposal a bit more. Part of that proposal was to dig deeper into my feelings about the pregnancy and my changing life. To that this week, I read Birthing From Within, which I finally got my hands on this month. That book prompted me to consider the fears that I have about the experience of giving birth in a hospital, so I created an entry documenting those fears, using acrylic paint and Photoshop. I hope that I can begin to address the fears in the coming months by calling them out (and talking to the doctors and my husband and etc). I did redact a couple of them because they were a little too personal to share here.









After my "fears" entry I needed to do something lighter. I switched to watercolor, graphite, and ink, and did a few cute little things that reflect some of the maternal and domestic feelings that seem to just keep getting more intense as the months go by.

Scrawl

As part of my proposal for the remainder of the semester, I said I would write for at least two hours about my experience being pregnant (so far), in order to document some things I don't want to forget, but also to go a little further in exploring my feelings and thoughts during this unique time of my life.

I did write for 2+ hours, and am so glad I did. The long-ish time period compelled me to dig deep for material. When I slowed down, I found myself exploring some ideas that were more difficult and personal. As a result, I felt that the writing was really too personal and special (almost... sacred) to share on the internet (no offense, comrades). So I created this entry that both presents and obscures what I wrote, by superimposing the ten pages of handwritten text. After considering bringing out some words or phrases that I was willing to share, I decided to allow the whole thing to remain sort of veiled and coded, and to exist as one big, shrouded visual form. That is how I feel about the experience of pregnancy, sometimes -- that it is really too special to explain, document, or translate. But everyone always tries anyway, me included.

For the other two entries, I extracted a couple of phrases that are less intimate, but still significant to me. I made some quick (less than 30 min. each) sketches from those, and that's what the other two entries are about.

Pits!

Landscape and narrative seemed like fitting elements for a two-page spread dealing with visual flow. Since I did most of my writing for this week's entries under an oak tree at Lake of Isles, I went ahead and sketched a little version of that scene, taking some text from the writing I did. Sketchy graphite, ink, and marker.

Feet

With this entry I kind of lost the thread of what I was doing aesthetically and stylistically, but it's part of the "raw sketch" series of entries intended to help me continue to loosen up with my visual journal. It turned out kind of dumb and I probably didn't put enough thought into it. But the text and subject matter came from the writing element of my process this week.

Two free entries

These spreads are the first two entries I've created in pursuing what I laid out in my proposal, inspired by some of the work in this week's readings. Observational sketches of my crazy environment during this crazy time of packing, house-buying, and pregnancy!

36 textures

Candace challenged me to incorporate texture into my journal. Since my journal is a blog (so, digital but with handmade elements), I created a digital entry by documenting 36 things I associate with my pregnancy so far. The array of textures is kind of interesting. It's not exactly in the "pat the bunny" vein that I think Candace had in mind, but it's me!

Some of the textures are secret and mysterious, but some I am happy to share! For example, some are foods that I've been eating a lot of (fig bars, edamame, tortillas), some are things to which I've had aversions or am not allowed to use during pregnancy (coffee, Listerine), and many are items made of cloth (favorite maternity clothes, a belly band, a shirt of my husband's that I've hijacked, two pillows given to me by my grandmother before she died and which I use to achieve a tolerably comfortable sleeping position at night). Other textures I documented include the basil plants I planted when I found out I was pregnant -- a sun hat I need to wear outside -- the bike helmet I won't be putting on again until next summer -- a lawn chair I've been chillaxin' in on the deck -- a shoulder bag that looks really cute over a pregnant belly -- a flowering plant Ben gave me for our wedding anniversary -- and a certain record I listen to almost every day).

Ink made from flower petals

For the last month I've marveled at the beauty and number of flowers in my Minneapolis neighborhood. I've never seen so many flowers in all my life! I've lived in the same spot for a few years, and I think there really are more flowers this spring and early summer. But it's possible that I'm noticing them more because this is such a happy time in my life. I imagine telling our baby, grown up someday, "When I was pregnant with you, we lived in Minneapolis and there were so many flowers that spring!"

To satisfy my desire to document this amazing flower display, I made ink out of flower petals this week. I've been wanting to photograph and illustrate some of this fabulous flora for a while now, and painting them with petal-ink is the sweetest way I can think of to allow content to inspire form -- or, as one of this week's prompts puts it, to let the medium support the idea.

I used watercolor brushes and a bamboo dip pen to do this naive little painting. It was a lot like painting with watercolor -- something I enjoy but am definitely not spectacular at.

I'm including a few process photos (below), showing the flowers and leaves after I chopped them up. I boiled the materials, mixed with rubbing alcohol (isopropyl alcohol), and set in the sun to reduce. The third photo below shows the final red ink. The only problem I had was with the green color; it's virtually impossible to make green ink from green plant materials. I think you have to make blue and yellow, and mix them. And I couldn't live with the yellow-brown in my little painting, so I super-saturated the leaves in Photoshop. I decided that it's my journal, and I can cheat if I want. :)

recto/verso

I thought making a thaumatrope to include in my visual journal would be a neat way to address this week's recto/verso prompt. It also uses some superimposing, like we were working with last week. I'd never successfully made a thaumatrope, and I don't know if this one is particularly successful either, but what can I say? That's part of exploring, I guess.

I used a bird-in-egg metaphor to speak to my journal theme. One side of the thaumatrope is the egg, and the other is the baby bird:
































And here's a video of it in action, for what it's worth. I slowed it way the hecks down but it's still really hard to see... if you look closely you can see the bird inside the egg, but it becomes so faint as the thaumatrope gets faster.

Sleeping on it

This article helped me understand the concept of random stimulation better. I'm a firm believer in sleeping on things, which is related to the random stimulation approach to processing our questions, problems, and the things that happen in our lives.

I'm completely serious when I say that "sleeping on it" has been one of my foremost creative tools in art school! I've really found that my brain is capable of amazing creativity if I just give it some time to do its thang, so I always try to begin a project early -- even with something as simple as a word list -- in order to give my brain something to chew over for a night or two. But because art school is crazy and sometimes we just don't have eight hours to wait, sometimes instead of sleeping on it, I'll just give it a few hours -- or I'll "shower on it" or "walk the dog on it." Even that short amount of time can help. So many times, I've felt that I overcame a creative stumbling block while washing my hair or something -- when just minutes before I was stumped or feeling uninspired.

Since my theme for this visual journal is my pregnancy, I tried to plumb my subconscious for any hint as to the sex of my baby, which is due in November. It probably sounds cliched and silly. But it's hard not to speculate. It's not because I'm dying to paint the nursery pink or buy a bunch of dumb gender-specific onesies or whatever, but rather it's that it's hard not to want some sign of who this creature is. At five months, there's little to be known -- in a couple of weeks we can find out the sex from the doctor, and we can find out things like, you know, does our baby have a heart defect or something horrible like that? Not a lot else can be known, and much of what can be found out is bad news. So you can see why expectant parents focus on the question of XX or XY!

For a couple of nights, I reflected about my question before turning in for the night. If I'm honest, I'll say that I don't remember having any dreams on the subject or even noticing any new or significant thoughts about it in the following days. But my own intuition on the subject just seems to get stronger and more certain, so I created a journal entry about my own hunch.

Normally I believe that what we call "women's intuition" is really not intuition so much as the result of lifelong training in interpersonal communication, noticing and interpreting others' verbal and nonverbal cues, socializing, and reading between the lines. But I came across this study from the U of Arizona that suggests that pregnant woman's hunches about the sex of their unborn babies are surprisingly accurate. You can read it here, but the gist of it is that 70% of women in the study who said that they had a hunch accurately predicted the sex of their baby. They didn't have any medical info or test results that could have clued them in.

I've had a strong feeling from the beginning about the sex of this baby, and it isn't based on a preference or anything. In a few weeks I'll find out if I was right. ...if I'm wrong, my husband and I are going to have to start thinking of some more names!

The journal entry above, "Mother Knows Best," is oil pastel, dry pastel, acrylic, and digital. It's a belly!

Intuitive colors

Click to see bigger.

My little color sketch of a fetus in the womb is based on and mimics a beautiful one by Davinci, who did many sketchbook explorations of fetuses.

I arrived at this palette before choosing the subject. The soft prettiness and fleshiness of these colors seemed right for a color study of a baby before it is born. And I chose this palette after exploring color with some watercolor washes (below). As you can see, I started out feeling drawn to the soft greens, but ended up realizing that the fleshy pinks and reds were actually what felt right, although I did not yet know that I would be doing a color study of a fetus. I would say that this palette is not one that I would normally choose for my work, because I tend toward the bright, saturated jewel tones often seen in children's book illustration -- so it was fun to find myself drawn to this palette through a more instinctual approach.

Exploring embedding!

The journal prompt on embedding and superimposing has been the most rewarding for me so far. (I also created entries in response to the prompts on random stimulation and color exploration, and those posts are forthcoming.) The image above is an example of how I began this entry, using forms cut from black paper, and momentarily I'll explain what I did and how it worked out.

But first I want to mention that this week I really thought a lot about the process and purpose of making exploratory journal entries. As I mentioned in response to some helpful feedback I received on the Bb discussion board, it is really hard for me, as an illustrator, to set aside my results-driven approach to making work. When I'm making images, two questions are always in my mind: what will this will be used for? and who are my clients/audience? But I realize that these questions do not serve the same purposes in making a journal, so I really tried this week to create journal entries that are purposefully incomplete -- in process -- exploratory.

To create an entry that considers the possibilities of embedding* and superimposing, I cut out about ten forms from black paper. Some of the forms are ones associated with my journal theme -- my pregnancy -- and a few were more intuitive, freehand, and abstract. The uterus (above) is the most literal one. Below is the full set of original forms, without any superimposing.



















Then I spent some time exploring how the forms could be layered and superimposed to create new forms with different meanings (or, if not "meanings," then at least different feelings -- very subjective, I know). I really couldn't have predicted how interesting and satisfying I was going to find this process, but it was weirdly liberating to just piece these forms together with no real plan -- just finding my way with what felt right and, importantly, not worrying about making something beautiful or finished. Below are some of my favorite results from this process.


















From the original simple forms that might invoke ideas of body parts, babies, and simple plant forms, I ended up finding references to science (at atom?), water animals, and cell clusters. I also found an unexpected decorative element in the form of some (roughly) bisymmetrical ornamental shapes and borders, as well as decorative forms created by the white space caught within repeated forms.

* Incidentally, "embedding" is also a pregnancy word!