ink drawings

Marinating in the fun stuff

A Creative Life, animals in art, art supplies, artistic inspirations, books, fine art, games in art, mental health, poetry, sketchbook, Sustainable creativity, whimsical art, words and pictures

This week I finished the painting I was working on in my last post and I continued playing around in the fun too!

I played with the new inks (see also my last post).

I made postcards for friends with these 2 inks as seen on my Substack newsletter. As you know I see art as a way to connect with people.

Playing in my sketchbooks is a way to explore and experience new art supplies as well as my own thoughts and feelings. I used on of the larger 8 x 10 inch sized sketchbooks as seen in this recent post when I got a batch of new sketchbooks.

This week we visited a locally owned bookstore called Broadway Books. I love their curated poetry section and got two books of poetry and some “haikubes” for added wordplay fun!

Another day this week we went to a 2nd Powell’s bookstore location on Hawthorne street. They have completely different book selections in each of the Powell’s bookstores so it’s fun to visit the curated collections for a good browse.

And we celebrated our anniversary of 27 years together and 10 years married at one of our local craft brewpubs!!

What a great week of soaking up the fun and celebrating life!!

Much love to you all and thanks for sharing in the fun!!

See you next Monday!

New ink, new books and the importance of mucking about

A Creative Life, art commission, art gallery, art supplies, books, life of the mind, mental health, Sustainable creativity

I finished my commission for the Caplan Art Designs Gallery and delivered it. Still can’t talk about it yet but I’m pleased and the Gallery was pleased… enough said!

With the leftover paint from the commission I began working on this painting currently in progress…

As a reward for finishing the commission my wife and I took a day to visit a few of our favorite places in Portland Oregon to play and generally muck about. The first place was Powell’s City of Books where we explored many of their 5 floors of spectacular book reading goodness and other fun things…

We each came home with small book hauls. Here’s mine…

Our other favorite place is Oblation Papers and Press. We got 3 bottles of ink: two are coffee colored and named “Caffe Creama” and “Espresso”. The third ink is named “Portland Rain” and it is a grey-purple-blue color like the, um, rainy Pacific Northwest sky this time of year! I also got two dip pens because…they’re dip pens.

I wrote about using sketchbooks as time capsules in my email newsletter. Here’s a repeat of the photo of a stack of new sketchbooks I’d shared earlier when I’d just gotten them…

…and I wrote on my email newsletter about a new bent pen recently. Here’s a photo of it…

…and here below is some mucking about that I did with the new pen in one of the larger new sketchbooks.

I’ll play around with my new inks later this week! I cannot stress enough the importance of play – aka mucking about – to creativity and mental health. Wahoo!!

I hope you have fun doing your own mucking about this week. See you next Monday-ish.