SHARING GOD'S BEAUTY
Praise God! Everything comes from God!
Meet the Artist
Hi there, I'm Elizabeth, a multimedia artist based in a small town in North Carolina. I love God, nature, and art and find myself wanting to seek Beauty, seek God's Beauty and show that through a variety of media such as: storytelling, poems, songs, dance, puppets, book-making, zines, stamp-making, design processes, painting, and of course drawing (the first medium I ever started with). May you be inspired!
Getting Into Drawing More Often
Live Today
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Live Today
Hello blogosphere,I'm Elizabeth and I'm deciding to make this art blog on blogger because, well, I don't have a lot of money to my name right now and I'm just gonna make it work if I do end up selling things.Of course I have a vision and great big goals and dreams for my artistic ventures but lately I've been draining myself completely with overwhelm day after day.
Writing in a journal helps, talking to my sister helps.
In fact I learned from our conversation today that I wanted to start sharing on the Internet.Firstly, I want to point out that I'm just writing for the sake of writing. Maybe by posting every so often each week will inspire someone else to create.
I'm really coming away from a place of "do" "do" "do" with my art as of lately.
Before I was just writing down goals for each week and spending all my efforts and time on them that I ended up not accomplishing any of them or getting to the laundry or cleaning the house as much as I should be or tending to the kids as much - I know that sounds bad.But I was really getting into my head a lot. I guess you could think of this as sort of an online diary.
Faceless, as I'm not the best speaker and stumble over my words over deep thoughts as my train of thought takes a long time to catch up to my words.
I have a physical journal on my dresser because I like my pen and paper, but something about keeping entries online, knowing someone might view them or benefit someone helps.
Or really I should say I have this trouble as an artist of wanting to be seen, yet I know God is my audience. But then if I'm not helping someone am I really using my artistic gift the way I should be? Art is meant to be seen, right? I think it could go both ways since God sees the unseen, and something done in joy, is unseen by the world but seen by God.It's a challenge to come away from working to churn out art then it is to make art out of sheer joy and pleasure.
But what I've learned about churning out art is that churn-out equals burnout. So to make art from sheer joy and pleasure is really what I want to get back into.I've always wanted to be an artist, but one thing I realized is that whether or not, an artist or working artist, I'm still an artist so long as I'm creating.An artist is simply someone that envisions what's not there and brings it to reality. Paid or unpaid.I feel very frustrated when finances are weighing on my art practice, very overwhelmed and that's why I've decided to take a step back, create this blog and just live today with my art. Get back to making art out of pleasure.Not everything has to be seen in the process. The reason why I loved art in the first place was because it was always just me, God, and the paper. He saw the process. The process is what I love the most.
And sure, some processes can be shown but not all.
And sure, sometimes I consider myself a working artist with the certain avenues, ideas, goals and dreams I have and want to do, which I'm beginning now with.
But the harder part is getting back to making art from that place of rest.I just want to get back into the rhythm of how it was before right after becoming saved when I was purely content with God being my only audience.But yeah, my sister and I were messaging one another and we both got to the point of: "just live today".
In other words, just live each day, or live today in case you stumbled upon this blog and are reading this and needed to hear this too.
Well that's it for my first entry. I'll call this blogger website "Elizabeth's art diary".
Getting into drawing more often
Drawing,The first medium I ever started with where I learned of my initial enjoyment for making art. Mostly art that could tell a story.I spent a great deal of time looking at picture books as a kid, not because I knew how to read yet or because I even liked reading, but to study out the pictures, the line work lol.And then my older brother's girlfriend one time brought over "tracing paper" for the very first time and showed us how to use it. I loved her support towards me as a kid.She was the first person to recognize my new found enjoyment and passion and encouraged creativity in my life by drawing me and my sisters pictures that she would mail to us when we had to move away.
A very sweet woman that I won't forget.
I don't think she will know this side of heaven just how positively impactful she was in my childhood life. If I ever run into her again, I would love to tell her a huge thank you for just how amazing of a cheer leader she was for me and my sisters.Back to the tracing paper she brought over one afternoon visit. My eyes are already big, but they grew even bigger at the sight of her demonstration of how to use this tracing paper. I just had to try it for myself immediately!It was an urgent matter to see and use this ingenious invention someone thought of.Suddenly, I was able to trace any illustration out of all those picture books I examined. Of course I went straight for the horse books. I found myself tracing horse after horse. Horses became my first subject of choice.
I tell myself I think I loved horses before ever actually seeing one in person but seeing it on a page. My heart was content in drawing them.
I still love horses to this day.That all to say,
When I'm painting, when I am designing digitally, sure I am content with these: but there's just something about drawing that when I am drawing, there is no time, whether I ate or not, feels the same.
It's only when I step back to look at the work that I glance at the clock and notice the difference in hours.Drawing helps me be in the present moment, or maybe outside of time is what it's called. As someone who's trying to step out of overthinking, by having this God-given gift to draw and lose track of time, is something that shouldn't be wasted but accomplished more often than not.The habit to come away from then is the tendency to push drawing to the back burner as I have for too long now because it didn't present me with finished work that is useful for an end goal.
But the cool thing is that it doesn't have to, drawing can simply be for the simplicity of just being.It's nice for a change to step out of the "churnout, burnout" habit. I saw these flowers standing in my vase on the kitchen table that got into my mind as something that needed to be drawn, something I wanted to draw.But for what? Seemed to ask my mind.
Just to draw, they need to be drawn.
Could we use them for anything?
I love how the flowers look, they need to be drawn.My mind continues trying to play the math behind art, like will this be used toward a pattern or something? I guess that's worthy to be drawn then if we can use it for something.At some point I had to ignore my mental notes on the matter and say 'sure' just so I could draw them.And so I did. I didn't draw the whole bouquet, but the parts I did draw were exactly what needed to be drawn. To serve no purpose other than existing. And to exist what felt like outside of time while creating, is such a feeling of living today, no other thoughts but simply being. A beautiful thing.