Remember that daily habits log I mentioned in the last post? Well, let’s be honest: waking up at 5 am during the COVID-quarantine ain’t happening, so I had to modify it. Here’s what I have now. I realized too late that forming daily habits (or daily rituals) needs to be done one baby step at a time. I expect even this version of the daily habits log will need to be modified, as it is too intense still but I will keep on keepin’ on.
And speaking of daily habits. If you don’t follow me on Instagram, shame on you… but that’s ok, I get it. Here are the daily drawings for days 2, 3, and 4 (out of 63), and an extra drawing just because I heart you. If you don’t know why I chose 63 days of daily ritual drawings, check out my explanation here.
Now to the fun stuff. My new pattern came out of a combination of two day’s drawings. I know, I know...I’m going to start sounding like a broken record buuuuut I lurv patterns! So much so that I’m learning how to sew so I can make adorable objects out fabric with my patterns printed on them (more on that in a future post 😏).
Creative Process (or a deep-dive into my mind grapes)
Here's a wonderful quote from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention that sums up this COVID quarantine for me "(Creativity is so fascinating because) when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life”. Now more than ever, I believe this statement to be true. Deep diving into my creativity and committing to the 63 days of creative rituals has led to the most prolific I've ever been!
But I digress, let me tell you more about the buffalo surface pattern design:
I saw this new pattern in my caco (head) as a long horizontal one, which may limit its uses a bit but hey, that’s how the picture looked in my mind-grapes and you gotta follow the mind-grapes! Most of the time, the full final picture comes into view like a thought bubble. And when that happens, decisions such as landscape or portrait, and dimensions have already been made. I’m just along for the ride. Color, however, isn’t determined until the main elements of the pattern are laid out.
Do you remember Anthony, the buffalo from my previous post? Anthony was begging me to become a pattern. I mean look at him?! He’s practically perfect in every way! I wasn’t digging the idea of him floating around in space and I remembered interesting trees when I visited Yellowstone, where I saw Anthony and his bison friends for the first time. So the picture in my head turned into this:
Memory is not to be trusted, I know. However, my memory of that first trip to Montana contained a lot of warm earthy tones that explain the color palette for the pattern.
Next steps
Next up, the bison pattern will be cut on my Cricut Maker and this template will be used to create patterned (pulp paintings) on my handmade papers. What? You wanna know how that turns out? Well then you'll have to keep coming back to this blog to check it out 🙃.
Till next time!
Natalie
