As we ended week 7 of quarantine I was really feeling down. I had to take a long hard look at what I could do to get myself out of the funk. My solution is that I needed art. Art is good for getting me to relax. For the last several weeks of school, like many parents across the nation, I became teacher, principal, and lunch lady to my kids. My days left me with very (if any) energy to spend for myself.
It was a problem. I relax when I do art of any kind. Whether it’s weaving, illumination, sewing, anything! It’s time I can take to create and let that side of me decompress, for lack of a better term. Sure, I may cuss like a sailor at tangled threads or a sleeve sewn inside out, but I’m focusing on that particular issue. When I’m doing any kind of art I tend to let everything else fade into the background. I can’t worry about anything else other than what I’m trying to create otherwise all I end up creating is a hot mess.
Staying Healthy
I tend to forget (rather easily) that my overall mental health really impacts my overall mood and such. If I’m in a bad headspace, it’s really easy for me to just slide even deeper into a bad mood. Which is the point I had reached early last week. It was not a good place.
Getting Better
To take better care of my my mental health I knew I needed to do two things. I needed something of a schedule. My kids have one for their homeschooling and home days since schools were shut down, I needed one for myself. I’m slowly putting that into play as I try to finesse my schedule and the one for the kids.
The second thing I needed to do was to create. I needed to create. Art is good for me, personally. While starting or working on any large project just wasn’t something I was feeling up to. I started small. If I could start a small art project and finish it, that sense of completion would go a long way in pulling me out of this weird head space I was in.
Practice Makes Perfect
My thought was to make small practice pieces using the 5×7 cuts of perg that came in the pack I purchased last year from the Limners and Artificers Guild. I’ve never done a scroll for court on anything that small. I thought that if the practice pieces came out okay then I could give them over as blanks.
A Fine Line
The first skill that I practiced is my fine line technique. I tend to have a heavy hand and even with my finest brushes, can have a hard time keeping even pressure. For this exercise I picked a figure drawn in the Mammen style. It was something simple enough that it didn’t take up the whole 5×7 piece. Since it turned out alright, I’m glad I decided to do it that way so that the scribe has place to write!
My lines, especially in the bottom swirly bits, didn’t wobble too much and had fairly consistent pressure. The top portion has a few rough spots where my pressure slipped, though far less than my earlier pieces.
Push the Puddle
My second piece was to practice “pushing the puddle” to get even paint coverage over a space. I’ve had a couple of spots in my past couple of scrolls where I just wasn’t happy with how I laid the paint down. There’s also only so much I could fiddle with it too. I have been saved by shading in one instance and white work in another. I’m still not satisfied though with covering it up though. It’s something I definitely wanted to work on. To that end I picked a pretty piece from a sketch book that was very lacy and done in a Gothic style. The challenge to myself was to get even coats of paint in each of the little areas.
I think it turned out really well but then, I did spend an inordinate amount of time on it for the size that it is. It was a challenge to really focus on outlining and then dropping a puddle to fill that outline. I have this stupid fear that the puddle will over run the outline, it never does though.