2016 Flashback
When I reflect on a year past I often think that nothing much happened – but when I went back through my art for the year I got a huge surprise. I think I finally have to accept that I AM an Artist! Warning this post is long!
I started the year with a 52 ATC card swap – thats right 52 individual playing card sized artworks each with its own found poetry (something new for me). Instant Astonishment Happened is my favorite cos it did and you can find the others by clicking here: Artist Trading Cards. Later in the year I started another deck – called the Dark Deck but it is still a work in progress – that happens!
Nature Deck
Throughout 2016 I completed 38 Art Journal Pages and fulfilled my objective of being more vulnerable in my art and sharing that with people out there. I regularly posted to 2 FB groups and played along with the Top2000 song challenge. You can see my pages here: Art Journal Pages and read about what I was thinking on them by clicking this Arty Thoughts. There are many I am really proud of but today these are the 3 I love:
J92 Dont Believe Every Thing That You Think
J99 The Art Of Sight
J114 The Monkey Men
In July went to my first art retreat and created my first large format painting – read about it in this post and about other art I created there in this post.
That’s me with Attempted Murder Interrupted
I also attended a printmaking class that resulted in Play Encourages Creative Adventures Artist Book and did some online classes including one on Birds and one on Moodiness which resulted in the start of my Gumnut Wisdom Artist Book
Play Encourages Creative Adventures
But wait there’s more -in October I participated in Inktober 2016 – the idea was to do an inky drawing a day to a prompt and post it on Instagram and my 30 birds and 1 fish joined literally millions of other images out there. I loved it and you can see my birds here. Todays favourite is this one:
Inky Birds – Friends, Wrecked (stoned), Surprise
I even put myself on a stamp:
Digitally Altered Stamp
Finally not mentioned to date are the 20 odd figures in the 100 Figures challenge and loads of other drawings that happened during the year.
I am really proud of myself – I took on challenges I thought I couldn’t complete and stretched myself in many arty way. 2016 was a tough year in other ways but its done and dusted – rock on 2017 and let there be more art!
