Lucy’s coloring book

Color me brightly

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Artist, pattern designer and believer in healing powers of art making.

  • Play Journal Update: 14 October

    I had a very long meeting on Wednesday, so I did some doodles in my Play Journal.

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    I used only ballpoint pen. The photo is not so great, I took it this morning when it was still dark outside, so it’s under the lamp. You get an idea of the conditions under which I create in the morning… I hate cold and darkness. Maybe it’s time to find my light therapy lamp.

    It’s been quite a gloomy week here. This morning I woke up at 5.30, so I had plenty of time to draw before going for a run and then to work. In summer when it’s light and warm outside, I go for a run first and then drink my coffee and do art. Now it’s too dark to go out at 7.00, so I either sleep longer or do art  before the run. It was a pleasant morning today and I worked in my play journal on a coloring pencil doodle I started few days ago. I started it with the crappy pencils and today I finished it with my new luminance pencils. What a difference! There are just a few finishing touches and it will be done, tonight or tomorrow morning.

    Oh, and it’s Friday today! Happy Friday people!

  • She Thinks Positive Journal Update: 13 October

    She Thinks Positive Journal Update: 13 October

    I had another 30 minutes last night and this morning, so I could finish my girl.

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    Her look said that she knows herself, so that’s what her message is. I really enjoyed my new pencils. They blend so well and you can layer and layer and achieve this wonderful smooth look. The only little thing is that it gets quite shiny at some point, but in this case I am not bothered because it’s in a journal, but if it were meant for hanging on the wall, I am not sure what I would think. That’s one thing that you do not get with Polychromos.

    Here’s a detail:

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    Overall, I LOVE the pencils. I love them more than Polychromos, I have to say. Next week I am going to try them on better paper. This was in Fabriano sketching journal, which has rather thin yellowish paper. I have some white cartridge paper at my other place, so I am excited to see what happens there… And tomorrow, I think, it’s back to watercolors and doodling…

  • She Thinks Positive Journal: WIP

    She Thinks Positive Journal: WIP

    I am a bit frustrated because I could not find enough time to draw with my new pencils… I had less than 30 minutes this morning and I started a face in my She Thinks Positive Journal.

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    It was raining this morning and it was very dark outside, so it was rather difficult to do the shading even with my lamp on. I did a light wash of watercolor and then continued with pencils on top. Here’s a close-up:

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    It needs more blending obviously. I am continuing tomorrow. YAY! [happy]

  • New Pencils

    New Pencils

    I’ve had really little time for art these past 3-4 days. I started several things, but did not finish any yet, so I have nothing to show you. Except… My new colored pencils arrived yesterday and I am super excited about them. I had just little time to try them in my play journal – started a face, very quick one, but I can tell you that even on this crappy paper the pencils behave like nothing I’ve seen until now. And I do have Faber-Castell Polychromos, which are professional pencils and very good of course, so I know what I am talking about. I am not saying Polychromos are bad, they are just different, so the comparison is not completely fair. I think that the two could work wonders in combination. I have to try.

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    So, Caran d’Ache Luminance 6901… They are wax based, same as Prismacolor, just much more expensive but, I think, worth the price, judging from the first 20 minutes I used them. I cannot compare them to Prismacolors, because I have never used those. I have heard many times that people are unhappy with Prismacolors being very prone to breaking, so I did not even want to try my luck with them. These are not supposed to be breaking, according to the reviews I read. I haven’t tried sharpening them yet, so I cannot say, but will let you know.

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    What I can say is that they are super soft and creamy and that they blend miraculously well even on this paper which is not meant for drawing at all. They cover the surface very quickly and with bright colors, and seem to last very long – after what I did, they seem hardly used at all. I kind of expected that they would be shrinking very fast judging from the amount of pigment they leave on paper. And there are so many colors (76) that I am positively overwhelmed. I hope that I will have some more time tomorrow morning to explore….

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  • Watercolor Doodle Time: Video

    Lately I’ve been obsessed with watercolor and ink doodles like this one:

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    I did it today, recorded it and video is now processing as I write this. I did upload to my shop on Redbubble, have a look, it’s really cool.

    There is another one that I did yesterday. Here’s the video of the process. Unfortunately the painting part of the video is lost by some funny glitch in my video processing program, so you can see only the doodle part. Today’s video seems to be complete and it will be up  later today.

  • Life Book Update: 6 October

    As with most other lessons in Life Book, I struggled to make myself start this one. Once I started however, it went great.

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    I managed to draw the face of my ‘muse’ with a marker without drawing it with a pencil first! And it looked totally ok! YAY! This lesson was not meant to be focused on learning a new skill or painting something pretty. It was about the self-healing.

    On the left hand side the letters say: I am overcoming that I am not doing enough (meaning for my self-improvement and education, but also for the people I love). And this is a negative thought pattern, which I need to overcome. On the right hand side it says: I am doing my best. I am as perfect as I can be. (self-forgiving affirmation which was supposed to break the negative thought pattern on the left hand side. In the middle is my artistic muse who I saw in the meditation and the symbol I saw integrating with her as her eyebrows. It means noting probably. The unreadable part is her letter to myself. It’s ok, I know what she wants to tell me.

     

  • Redbubble

    Redbubble

    Yes, I did it. The shop is called Lucydesigns because Lucyscoloringbook was too long!

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    I uploaded only three pictures. Scanning and editing takes a long time and I have a full time job. Anyway, I really like how my paintings look on their stuff, so I will probably have to order something for myself. It sucks because I live in Europe and shipping and customs will make my life miserable, but I like to think that it will be worth it. I will let you know when I decide to do it.

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    This was my start of this week. I am also playing catch-up with Life Book and Vitamin Sea. I hope to do 3-4 lessons until end of week.

  • Play Journal Update: 03 October

    Play Journal Update: 03 October

    I did several pages in my Play Journal last week:

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    This one is done in lunch breaks at work. The left page is obviously hand drawing practice. At first I thought there is nothing coming out of it, without an eraser and looking at a scanned book page on the screen, so I must say I am again surprised with myself. They actually look like hands 🙂 One very satisfying thing about it is the pencil I used – it’s a Derwent Drawing pencil in chocolate color. I have two of those pencils (the other color is blue) that I bought who knows when and why and almost never used because I almost never draw. LOL! The pencil is beautiful soft and creamy and I really enjoyed using it. Another thing that I did not have, besides the eraser was a pencil sharpener, so I used up the pencil almost to the wood which of course prevented me from doing any details, which was scary but I think very helpful in the end because it stopped me fussing about the details and worrying about being very accurate in reproducing the photos. So, it’s a sketch. The mermaid on the opposite page was a practice for Vitamin Sea painting I need to do this week. Mermaids never give up when it comes to drawing practice. Far from perfect, but perfection was not the goal.

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    The next two pages. The left is one more mermaid practice. This time I gave her some sea water with water soluble pencils. On the right hand side an autumn doodle with colored pencils and ink. Here’s a more detailed photo:

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    The next two pages look like this:

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    Obviously left page is still empty. And the photo of the mandala on the right in more details:

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    That’s it for today. My idea about putting my work out there on Red Bubble did not leave me. So this morning I registered and uploaded my first work. It looks amazing. I will write about it some time soon. For the time being, have a happy Monday!

     

  • Play Journal Update: 30 September

    I am sorry that the video I posted yesterday did not work. I will have to use YouTube for videos obviously. I don’t know why there is an option on WordPress to upload videos if they won’t play. Ok, I give a slight chance that I did something wrong 🙂

    Anyway, here’s the doodle from the video:

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    It’s in my Play Journal, done with crappy colored pencils and ink. I ordered very expensive colored pencils and they should arrive next week (when I will be away), so in two weeks time I will post a photo of my new treasure. I am in as much love with colored pencils as I am with watercolor, so don’t ask. Yes, I do have Polychromos 60 pieces tin and I love them, but I also wanted to try Prismacolors. Now as everybody’s saying that Prismacolor quality control is crappy, I did not want to buy them and in addition they cannot be easily found where I live, so I opted for something even better: Caran d’Ache Luminance, which are… um… very expensive… I thought to myself: WTH my dear, if you have that money, spend it on something you really want. Not that I needed much persuasion… So there we go. They are on their way to me. They say that they can draw on black paper too, so one reason more to try them!

    And yesterday I started a new watercolor doodle in my Strathmore Journal:

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    I planned to doodle around the painted shapes, but this morning I changed my mind because it looked so pretty as it is. So I will leave it. I used turquoise Ecoline and new gamboge from Daniel Smith. I think they are beautiful together.

    Migraine is definitely gone. I went for a run this morning. The weather is still great, weekend is coming and all is good. Have a happy Friday!

  • Post-Migraine Musings

    I seem to be fine today. Except feeling a bit shaky and sad, but it may have nothing to do with anything that happened previously. Actually, it has everything to do with at least something that happened, otherwise it would not be happening. Do you know what I mean? No? Never mind. I did finish something in my Play Journal this morning, but I did not take a photo. Instead I recorded a small video for Instagram, and I will try to insert it here, not sure if it will work, let’s see…

    It’s not working in the preview, maybe it will work in the real view, maybe not, bear with me. I think it’s not my fault, I am pretty good with computers but this WordPress application has a  mind of its own.

    The weather is nice and sunny and it’s been really beautiful the whole week. Alas, I am office-based, so I can only admire it from inside and with the migraine going on for four days I didn’t do even that. I did not go for my morning run this morning, because I was afraid that the migraine might come back. And I needed the rest. Instead I doodled a bit longer this morning while drinking my coffee and it felt really good. I love my mornings.

    I had this sudden idea while I was driving to work today that I could open a Redbubble or Society6 profile and see if I can get some audience for my stuff. Actually I was thinking how cool it would be if I could get some of my doodles on a t-shirt or pencil case, or pillow case, or some such thing. So, maybe I will get something going next week when I get to the scanner and properly scan stuff, because photos that I am taking are not really well taken. Let me stay with that idea for a little while. Maybe… Maybe it’s just a migraine after effect and it will pass. It would not be the first time.

    I also finally get the idea how to finish the huge canvas I started months ago on my mother’s request. Oh, I am so bad with producing ‘useful’ art. I easily fill the journals and notebooks, but when it comes to actually purposefully producing something to really hang on a wall, I am useless. So, I have this idea: I already did the background and was thinking about doing some doodle flowers on top, but somehow could not decide how exactly I want them. So, related to the previous idea of scanning and printing my doodles, I thought maybe I could use the prints to make a collage on top of that big canvas. I think it might look cool. So, I am definitely scanning those pages next week and printing them the week after, and then I will see how they look and decide.

    And I also need to continue playing catch-up with my courses. I decided that I will stick to Life Book and Vitamin Sea because they are the most important. I will download Ever After lessons for some time later. After I finish the Vitamin Sea, I will concentrate on BOD 2016, which was totally neglected. Oh, yes, and I already downloaded the Art Journal Summer School 2016 and I will do it next year in January to make winter more bearable. Does it sound like a plan to you? And no shopping for courses until Christmas. After that I will buy Life Book 2017. But that’s allowed, right?

    So… If you read until here, thanks for your effort. If you lost me somewhere along the way, I don’t blame you. Regular arting broadcast will resume tomorrow 🙂