I am finding it difficult to get motivated to anything right now.  The weather is just cold, wet and miserable and the craft room is too cold to work in.  I am in a bit of a rut so I went through some old art journals and sketchbooks that I have for inspiration.  The next few pics are from an old small 9cm x 14cm hard cover sketchbook (maybe a Talens Art Creation book).  They are quite good little books but as I open them out to do double pages the spine takes a bit of a bashing.  I used quotes that I liked and tried out multi media and methods.  So I am feeling inspired to do more of the same.

There is a youtube channel called ‘Put some colour in your life’ so using mainly acrylics and pastels  and some posca pens I made this colourful double page spread.

For this one I collaged some clips from magazines and an old page from a book.  I highlighted the words ‘craft’ and ‘tinkering’ in the book page as when I am feeling a bit lost I like to just tinker and play in the craft room rather than go full steam into a project.

One of my bug-bears of painting is that it uses up a lot of paint and supplies which is expensive and I used to worry that I was wasting not only time but all of my art media if things didn’t turn out well.  This quote helped me change my attitude to that way of thinking. Paint is only wasted when it stays in the tube – so true.

I think the next quote was by Suzanne Vega.  ‘Money can buy: doctors but not health, clothes but not taste, make-up but not beauty. ‘  More collage work using collage papers and a napkin £20 note.

Always worrying about things not turning out right will stop you doing anything, so you have to focus on what can go right and not what could go wrong.

Don’t strive to be perfect but just making progress is good enough.  Embrace imperfection uses acylics and stamps.  I used to use this little book to list all the media (stuff) that I had so that I wouldn’t buy doubles but that never worked so I painted over the pages to use it as an art journal instead.  Here I have left some of the writing showing through the paint.  It is a nice wee reminder  that it isn’t about what you have, but how you use it that counts.  Wabi sabi comes to mind as the Japanese find beauty in imperfections.

Fear of the blank page (or anything else in life).  this quote sums it up nicely.  ‘Fear is not the enemy.  Waiting to stop felling afraid is’.  I don’t know where some of these quote come from, maybe a pod-cast I was listening to or a TED talk?  Mainly acrylics in this one and a bit of collage and stamping using found objects.

Using napkins with bright autumn leaves on and gel medium, I added this quote;  ‘Autumn shows us how beautiful it is to let things go.’  Oh if only we could just let things go.

So I still have plenty pages to fill up yet just need some more quotes.