Editors note:  There seems to be a problem getting this to print – any of you techies know why or how to fix?  In the meantime, if you are on Facebook, you can go here in my Facebook album for the picture.  Look at the lower right under the picture and click on “download in high resolution.”  That took me through a wizard that printed the picture out fine on 8.5 x 11 paper.  sorry about that!  Will see what I can do to fix!

For Day 2 of Art Every Day Month I thought I’d restart my coloring book pages .  When I color my pages, I will post them here for my blog.

When I’m doing art (or posting) every day, it means I can’t wait for inspiration to strike, I have to go find it.  Finding it is really more about opening to the Wild Child in me and letting her play hide and seek with wherever her passion leads for the day.

Often we think we “can’t” (make art, market, cold call, talk in front of a crowd) unless we’re really on top of everything.  Simply put, we prefer to be in total control.

As you may have noticed, life is not always like that.  Sometimes life throws things at us that we have to catch and make do with.  And sometimes we put ourselves in that position (like my personal commitment to create something every day of November, although Leah does not require that to be a participant).  I put myself in this position because it really stretches me:  I have to make room for creating and posting something every single day.  Yesterday my WordPress squashed everything together and refused to put the caption under the photo.  So I left it at that.

Art Every Day Month, for me, isn’t about perfection.  It’s about finding out all that I can do.  It’s about imperfection and going with it anyways.  It’s about letting go and letting the wind fill my sails in whatever direction it chooses. It’s about playing with my Tribe because it gathers hundreds of artists and their blogs all in one place.

This morning it chose not to let my Adobe Photoshop open despite multiple attempts.  So I opened it and let it stay stuck and it finally unstuck itself.  Onward.  Meanwhile I was searching for my sketch book from the preceeding years.  Never found it.  But I had some new ones in stock waiting, so instead of obsessing about having several different sketch journals, I simply started a new one.  No drama.  I think there are days I use drama as a good excuse to stop dead in my tracks.  No today!  I have Art Every Day Month to pull me toward a happy, drama-free outcome!

Usually drama-free is good.  Drop the stories and go with what’s in front of you.  Sometimes we must wander in order to find our path.  Sometimes we must allow the world to see our warts.  Sometimes we must stand, by ourselves, in what we want and why we want it and let the how take care of itself.  In my case, that’s called practicing patience (never my strong suit and I will admit to some blue air before I decided to let Adobe take its time and do it however it needed to do it).  Sometimes the path opens before us in totally unexpected ways – and for me that is almost always through art.

 Inspiration

For days I need to get *something* accomplished, I keep a file of pictures to draw from (I like figurative so that’s what I pull out of magazines and keep).  Of course I also have some wonderful art books around.  And there’s always the camera.

To the right you see my inspiration for the day.  Easy as sketching from collected pictures!

What inspires you and helps you along your way?  Will you share it with us here?

Wylde Women’s Wisdom

Finding your tribe offers more than validation and interaction, important as both of those are.  It provides inspiration and provocation to raise the bar on your own achievements.  In every domain, members of a passionate community tend to drive each other to explore the real extent of their talents.  Sometimes the boost comes not from close collaboration but from the influence of others in the field.  Ken Robinson