Influences (part 1)

Exploring what fascinates, delights and inspires me

Hello my friends.

It’s been a week since Letters From Wonderland was released and I’ve been inevitably recovering from the extra excitement and needing to be ‘on’ more than usual. Add in a stressful day in which we lost my bag, and then receiving my Covid booster, and I’m feeling particularly depleted.

However, art-making has continued. How lovely to be able to say that!

I thought I’d pop on and share a page from my sketchbook which I’ve been playing with this week. In my hunt for my visual ‘voice’ and in planning my DIY arts education, I thought I’d start by looking at the components that make up my life, both now and in the past — those things that are uniquely me, that fascinate, delight and inspire me, that may offer a deep foundation on which to grow my work.

Making collage illustrations without any pressure to prove a particular style felt really fun. I’m planning to continue this spread next week to explore what I loved as a child, and what some of my influences have been over the years. It will give me, I hope, a kind of portrait of where I am. By making all these unconscious loves and obsessions more visible, I can more easily draw on them.

on the easel

I also made a new painting this week! I wanted an image to accompany my new bimblings and was delighted to find that something appeared quite quickly by playing, pasting and painting over an old canvas. I have REALLY missed collage over the last few weeks while I focused on my 100 day painting project, so it felt good to get back to some mixed-media work. I’m really pleased with this one.

just for fun

Needing to rest more gave me a good excuse to have a go at something I’ve been wanting to do for AGES — to learn how to use Procreate on F’s iPad to make digital illustrations.

I’ve been following tutorials by Art With Flo, closely following her step-by-step, so what follows are not in any way original — they’re just copies of Flo’s brilliant work in order to learn the tools — but they’re so sweet, I thought I’d share!

My hope is that if I can learn the HOW by copying, I can then start to make my own stuff in my own style. Being able to work digitally would be invaluable when I don’t have the energy to work physically with paint or to be downstairs. And it would give me a whole new visual language to explore which feels really exciting.

Until next time!

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You’re reading the art diary of author Josie George. For more words, check out bimblings.