Currently Browsing: Expectations 97 articles
Don’t Let Perfectionism Keep You from Enjoying Your Art Practice
When you’ve spent decades teaching in-person classes in book binding, you’ve made a bunch of demo books! You work through a stage in the structure while students pay attention and ask questions. Then they complete the steps you just demonstrated, while you mingle and help those who are confused or struggling. Teaching, over time, presents […]
Don’t Be Afraid of Messy Studies—What Are You Learning?
Too many of my students in the past have obsessed about perfection in their studies. They worry about their studies being messy, partially complete, and in every other way weak and unconvincing. They are worrying about the wrong thing. The purpose of a study is to try out an idea or approach. To give a […]
Improving Your Eye: Working through Corrections
I write a lot about working directly in ink and embracing the wonkiness that results. I encourage my students to work in ink and embrace the wonkiness—but that doesn’t mean we stop training our eye, and stop refining our work. I’ve seen hundreds of students who believe the only way to improve is to start […]
Lots of Palette Changes
I intended to simply write about this palette chart today, but in preparing this post I found lots of photos and scans of different palettes over the years. I am posting them today as a sort of virtual tour through my palettes since I’ve had the blog (2009; oops, actually going back to 2003 with […]
Fun with Grids and Studies: Or Things to Do with Leftover Paint
You always have time to make tiny sketches. Don’t forget that! Even the tiniest of sketches allows you to work on your observational, paint mixing, and shape comprehension skills. And in my case, fascination with hair and beard styles. Background Events I’m doing the last bit of journal index catch up I had hanging over […]
Doodling: Let Your Mind Play—Remind It of the Value of Play
I’m often doddle and draw on non-art papers—simply because I’m sitting at my desk working and all that I have immediately around me is office supplies—bond copier paper and Post-It Notes™. (You see both of those types of paper in the first image today.) I wrote earlier this month, and many other times in the […]
End-of-Year Journal Wrap Up
Blog readers know I like to do an end-of-year wrap up. I look back at my journal productivity. It helps me see an overview of my creative practice and formulate new goals and directions for the future. I also can see at a glance what is happening with my practice and how I might need […]
End-of-Year Journal Page Thoughts
OK it’s that time of year when I seem hilariously obsessive as I move towards and end-of-year-journal wrap up and look at the year I’ve just drawn and written through. I thought I’d show you this page spread to give you a chance to start giggling. This is a 5 x 6 (approx.) inch journal […]
Journaling on a Circle Grid
For eleven days in September this year I worked on a “grid” made of circles, just for grins. I thought you might enjoy seeing the process and how the project grew. The first image in this post is the completed grid. I’m going to lose the quotation marks around the word grid—I see it […]
Ink Only? Paint It? Or Let It Go?
Everyday we make choices in our journals. The simplest for me is stop at ink only? Paint over the ink (opaquely or transparently)? Or leave the texture alone all together? We get to make a different, individual decision every time we turn a page in our journal. Long ago I was more strict in my […]