Creative Every Day

Assorted Goods

October 17th, 2008

Jenn has shared the link of my chat with the Co-Active coaches Creative Artists group and you can listen to it right here. I talk a bit about Art Every Day Month (AEDM), ways to get creative when you're feeling uninspired, and also lead an intuitive art exercise at the end of the call. I thoroughly enjoyed being on the call and chatting with like-minded souls about being creative every day.

One of the things that came up on the call was the difference between the Creative Every Day 2008 challenge (CED2008) and AEDM and I don't think I did a fabulous job at describing the difference then, so I wanted to address it quickly here.

CED2008 was born out of wanting to continue the sense of community and commitment to creativity that I felt with AEDM. Both challenges are very loose and flexible, so that anyone can feel good about joining in, so the two challenges really do overlap. If you're already doing CED2008, then technically you could be doing AEDM too. For me, because AEDM is a short-term challenge, just going for the month of November, I feel good about committing to creating and posting something every day (this is not required for folks doing AEDM, but it is what I commit to doing). I created CED2008 as a way to continue the commitment to creativity and for me that meant simply focusing in on my creativity and recognizing it without necessarily posting something every single day. That was how I approached the challenges, but I left it open for others to interpret however it felt good for them. Hopefully that makes the difference clear enough. Feel free to ask any questions though!

On to other things! I mentioned getting a sample of Golden's new Open Acrylics, three little tubes of titanium white, alazrin crimson, and blue. I'd turned off the Red Sox game because they were down 7-0 in the 7th and I just couldn't bear to watch anymore, well, go figure, they ended up coming back to with 8-7 in just two innings! I should know better than to count them out! So, I was all hyped up when I found out they won and decided to pull out those paints and just play while I watched highlights. I put out some red paint which turned into a mermaid (so many mermaids lately!) and later just started doodling what became two octopuses.

Open Acrylics are a new line of paints that are water-based, but have a much longer drying time. So, they're not like your typical acrylic paint. They stay open to manipulation longer, like oils. It was interesting to play with them. I'm used to the fast-dry of acrylic, so sometimes going back to paint over something was frustrating because the paint underneath wasn't totally dry. But being able to re-manipulate something with a bit of water was very cool. I'm kind of an impatient painter, so I'm not sure I'd use them on a regular basis, but I could see how they'd be very fun to play with.

Yesterday afternoon, I was feeling a bit rattled after reading far too many political articles about the weird and lame claims about voter fraud in Ohio and I needed some cheering up. This video totally did the trick for me. Thank you ninja cat!