a little lime

Yep, I think it's pretty clear to everyone by now that I have lost my mind..........the first four drawings from my moleskine string journal:  this ball of string was just about the end of me: hx

Have you had enough of the strings already?? Did you cringe in horror when you saw the title? More to the point, have I had enough???? Unfortunately not.... ah, me and my obsessive tendencies, we're a package deal...... and since I have always loved drawing loops, threads, ribbons and laces, it's probably not surprising that I'm still feeling the string love. I've tracked down a fresh moleskine folio from my stash upstairs and will be continuing the journey in that. delicious. So, the offering for today: String cosmos: Just string: Now, off to make my morning green juice.......have a good day all! hx

I am still drawing strings.........they are very mindless and therapeutic. Love them. As mentioned in my previous post, the concept is based on a pin of a Jaime Derringer string drawing that I have on my "doodles" pinterest board - you can see more of Jaime's string work here  - it's fabulous and well worth checking out. I have had a few people ask how to go about starting something like this - my process was basically just to start and keep drawing lines - I didn't think about it all that much, though there was lots of stopping and starting so that I could get plenty of connections and strings going over and under. Every time you do this it's going to be different, but here's a step out of the process that I used and a few tips which I hope make sense. Back to my string....... hx

Something else that I like to do when I short on inspiration is to try out someone else's cool idea - in this case I wanted to have a play around with this string idea that I'd pinned a while back. Love this. so cool and way, way better than my attempts. I did pages of this stuff. I started off just getting a feel for how I should approach it - my version is less intense and not as cohesive as the original piece. I think I'm just genetically programmed to minimalize - though I will keep playing! After this, I knew that I would want something more simplified that suited my drawing style, so my next progression was significantly pared down: After a break to have a coffee - inspiration struck (finally!!!) and I thought I would try combining the string with my favourite flowers: So, has it worked? Do I feel inspired and have more ideas to go ahead with?.....well, yeah, I do! I'm happy with what I came up with and feel excited to...

When I don't feel very inspired (like lately), it can be a little hard to pick up my pen and do anything with it - I just know that there's not going to be anything exciting happening when I put that pen to paper, so why bother, right? Well, I am a big believer of the more you create, the more creative you become, so although I might be tempted to just take a break (and, admittedly, sometimes I do), other times I like to work through the dry spell and see if I can drag some inspiration along with it. One of my start up tactics is to draw some random circles on the page and just start from there. Here's yesterdays drawing: Not very exciting, and similar to stuff I've done before - but, it got me drawing. Here's some progression pics - unfortunately they are not great because I was too lazy to scan each step, so took them on my ipad - you'll also have to ignore the fact that it is upside down to the finished drawing (I just realised this as I was ...

A "use my tangle" diva challenge this week - 8's parte dos. Pretty. Alright, confession time........ I'm actually a little scared of complicated dot grids - my dots go all over the place, I lose track of what I'm doing, etc, etc.......so, to be honest, I did not even attempt to draw this pattern using the instructions. Once I saw all those dots I had horrible flashbacks to my first attempts at Mi2 and promptly hid in my closet. It took John 2 days to coax me back out. I kid you not. O.k., yes, I am kidding. It was only 1 day. Because I love the look of these patterns, and still want to draw them well, I like find ways that work for me and suit the loose, flowing drawing style that I (mostly) prefer to do. My approach is to look at the pattern as a "whole", break it down into shapes and once I understand how those shapes work together, I  just draw it out from there. 8's parte dos initially pared back to x's and +'s for me,...