Cover

Since my first entry in the journal was a self-portrait, I decided to do a second self-portrait for my last piece, the cover. I tried to refer to colors that recur throughout the journal. It's acrylic and digital.

Lots of beauty, and some unanticipated ugliness

My husband and I moved into our new house this weekend, so for most of the week I was toying with ideas for making entries about my this new environment -- the house our daughter will (as far as we can know) grow up in. It is the sweetest of houses in a small Minnesota town, and I am so happy here already. Unlike in the Cities, it is utterly silent here at night, and dark. The streets are quiet. Because it's summer, everything is green. And our land has fruit trees on it -- cherry, apple, plum. I even discovered that the land was once owned by the founder of this town, John North, in the 1850s, which is so neat.

Our new town seems like the perfect place to grow up, and I can already imagine our little girl exploring all of the things contained in this house and in this town.

So, basically, this is one of the happiest times of my life, full of hope and excitement and real joy. I've been writing (and drawing) about this wonderful time all week (all summer, really, thanks to the visual journals class), so I decided to do something different for my entries this week. I decided to document (in photos, because that's a medium I knew I could work quickly in, and I had to be cruelly realistic about time management this week) some of the ugly and unpleasant things around me right now, because these "thorns" are temporary -- the boxes will eventually be unpacked, someday we'll replace the horrible linoleum, my studio won't always be a disaster area, the house will get clean. But right now, those things are unattractive and chaotic and stress-causing. I decided to capture some of those things because, unlike my happy family and our plum tree, they will soon disappear.

Here's the first set of images. Gross!

Floor and more

Ugly 1970s flooring, plus a dim and gross corner of the house... the dark side of home ownership!

Moving while trying to be an illustrator

I happened to get a freelance illustration job for one of the big children's magazines -- my most important freelance job so far -- smack in the middle of the busiest time of my life (busiest up until now -- I know it will be even crazier after the baby is born!). I wanted to document the ridiculous state of my new studio as I try to finish the freelance assignment, unpack the basic things we need to survive at the new house, finish my three summer courses, mitigate my pregnancy-related exhaustion by occasionally resting, and keep a sense of humor about all of it!

How he feels about it

The other challenge I received was to create a journal entry about how my husband feels about all of this. I really struggled here, because I know how he feels -- happy, excited, nervous, a little scared -- but I didn't know how to represent these things. It occurred to me to have Ben create the entry himself, but that just didn't seem like the right solution somehow. What I ended up creating is a sketch of something that I think encapsulates how happy, excited, and involved he is. It's just a graphite sketch of him reading the old Winnie-the-Pooh stories to me (and the baby), something he's been doing each night. Those stories are so wonderful, funny, and un-Disney, with awesome illustrations by Ernest Shepard. And our baby can now has functional ears, so she can hear her dad reading to her -- and me laughing at the funny turns of phrase in these stories. I love the part where we learn that Pooh once lived in the forest under the name of Sanders.

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).

Tantrum

This image is blowing my mind right now and I had to share it because it is just so wild. I had an ultrasound this week and the technician captured this image of our baby looking like she is screaming in anguish!! (Fortunately they said she was likely just yawning.) There are also plenty of her looking like the most angelic thing on the face of the earth, but obviously those aren't as haunting.

Family

This is a sketch for a painting I'd like to do. It takes me about two weeks to finish an illustration of this size with acrylic, so I just created the sketch this week. I think the composition is almost there, although I want to play with the framing and the white space on the left, and I'm mostly happy with the characters. Some of the positions of the characters will be tweaked.

The footprints in the snow (on the left) are there to make it clear that they're a family and they came from the same house.

Girl/boy/neutral

This drawing is another response to the experience of registering for baby gear last week. My husband and I were taken aback by manufacturers' labeling of nearly every product in the store as "girl," "boy," or "neutral." We expected some of that but were a little disturbed by the magnitude of it. Color as a marker of gender identity is so weird and so widespread in the U.S. (is it elsewhere in the world?). Even my mother waited until I told her the sex of the baby to buy decorations for the baby shower she's throwing me. And today when my husband and I found out that we are having a girl (!!!smiles!!!), the staff at the doctor's office immediately marked my file with a pink symbol.

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. :)

Little girls

This week, responding to prompts related to field effect and open/closed forms, I did this black and white illustration of little girls on a playground. In addition to having children and babies on the brain right now, I'm inspired by some related things going on my life -- things like buying a house surrounded by countryside, in a small town full of beautiful parks and playgrounds for kids.

I originally sketched this composition with graphite and then rendered it Illustrator, going for a chalk-on-asphalt look.

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!